Splitting Hairs
A comedy article
by Gabe  9,232  13
09/02/2004 06:29 PM 319 views
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Splitting Hairs
When I was in about the middle of tenth grade, some friends and I started playing poker regulary. Not high stakes poker... In fact the stakes were about as low as you could get. We'd start with pennies and I don't think we had quite yet graduated to nickel ante. Because of this, we'd arrive at our games with thirty pound Ziploc bags filled with coins. It was pretty pathetic.
One night we were at the house of the girlfriend of one of the players. We were clustered around the kitchen table in the middle of a hand when the doorbell rang. I'd just folded so I got up to answer the door. I walked from the kitchen into the living room. In doing so, I stepped over a dog fence in the doorway that kept the pooch out of the front of the house.
I opened the door to find our friend Adam on the front porch. After letting him in, I headed back to the table. In an uncharacteristic bit of athleticism, I hurdled the dog fence on my way back through the doorway.
You might note that the height of doorways inside a house are somewhat lower than the ceilings; around 6' 8" in the average home. I'm 6' 2". You do the math. Anyway you slice it, a leaping Gabe won't fit through a doorway vertically. When my head hit the ceiling, my forward motion stopped and I headed straight down. My 225 pounds made short work of the dog fence. I'm lucky I didn't get a piece of wood stabbed into me somewhere. For clarity I made a little Flash animation to demonstrate.
My poker buddies, being the true friends that they are, all started laughing at me. I staggered to my feet, apologized to the girl whose dog fence I'd just crushed and promptly took my seat at the table to get dealt into the next hand.
A minute or so into the hand a friend across the table gave me an odd look.
"You've got blood dripping down your face," he said.
I lifted a hand to my scalp and patted gingerly around the recently smacked area. When I brought my hand back down I was horrified to see that it was bloody. Not just a little bloody either. It looked like I'd just dipped my hand into a bucket of red paint. I got up and ran into the bathroom, grabbing a hand towel in the hopes that direct pressure would stop all my precious blood from leaking out.
At some point my parents got called and they drove into town to pick me up. (We lived about fifteen minutes outside of the city limits.) My father surveyed the damage.
"It looks worse than it is," he said. "I don't think you need to go to the emergency room."
I need to point out here that my father is a doctor. Not an emergency medicine physician like my wife, whose skills I would have gladly welcomed in the fixing of my noggin. Not a trauma surgeon, or a general practitioner, or anything really helpful. He's a radiologist. Had I needed someone to look at an x-ray of my colon he would have been my first choice. But for hands-on patient care I'd rather go elsewhere.
Nevertheless, I took it on faith that he had some idea of what he was talking about. My mom drove my car and I rode home with my dad.
Once we'd arrived, he plopped me down on a stool in the kitchen to take another look at my head. After this exam he decided to change his diagnosis.
"Maybe you do need stitches," he mused. Apparently there was no need to drive back into town and waste a $30 co-pay for competent medical advice when he could take care of business right in the kitchen.
He retrieved his doctor's bag from the depths of one of our closets. After brushing off the inch thick layer of dust he cracked it open. Underneath the leeches and the bottles of brain tonic he found some suturing materials.
My mother (a former nurse) assisted by throwing a towel around my shoulders, shaving a patch of hair around the wound and cleaning off some of the blood. To tidy up the wound she used good old fashioned alcohol.
The first thing they tried was an anesthetic. Due to the Lidocaine being purchased during the Johnson administration, its effectiveness was less than desired. All that was accomplished was making my head hurt even more because of the repeated needles being jammed into it. After a few minutes had passed I informed my father through wracking sobs that I could still feel everything. He decided then and there that the very next day he'd get a medical supply catalog and update everything in his kit. But that was a day away, and he had no intention of stopping.
Let me say that having someone sew up your head when you can feel it isn't much fun. Had I not been such a Poe, I could have grabbed a mirror and done things myself, a la Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse or the ship's doctor in Master and Commander. I'm a wuss though, and I'm pretty sure I bawled through the whole thing.
I remember the next day at school several people were startled when they saw the giant bald patch on my head with the gash and its nasty Frankenstein-like stitches dead center.
Time passed and the stitches eventually came out and my hair grew back. To my father's credit everything healed fairly well and I didn't end up with any nasty infections. I shave my head these days and in telling this story I can tip the ol' dome forward and point out the still visible scar.
What really amazes me about this story is something that happened about five years later. I was living in Rochester, New York at the time and my parents had come to visit. The three of us joined my best friend and his wife for dinner one night and during the course of the evening, I had regaled the group with this tale.
Upon finishing, my father looked at me curiously.
"I don't remember that."
"You don't remember? You don't remember me splitting open my head? You don't remember stitching me up in the kitchen? How the hell can you forget something like that? Mom, help me out here."
She laughed a little. "I don't remember that either."
I was floored. They both sat there looking dumbfounded. I only wish they'd been pulling my leg. That at least would have been a trifle amusing. THEY'D ACTUALLY FORGOTTEN.
At least they remember my name. I still have hope.
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Like This? Rate It!
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Side-splitting
57 votes
5.0
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8 Comments on "Splitting Hairs"
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0 votes
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Baby Jesus Felipe 161,353  14
11/03/2004 05:34 PM
I think I could watch that animation fifty times and still laugh.
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0 votes
0.0
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Gavvo 1,789 12
11/03/2004 06:03 PM
The animation was the best part. Have to clean coffee my keyboard now...
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0 votes
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Dogs Akimbo 211,539 32
11/03/2004 07:06 PM
For clarity I made a little Flash animation to demonstrate.
That's the shizzle!
When I die, I want a Gabe-Flash animation of my life to play at the wake.
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0 votes
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Livewire 78,229 13
11/03/2004 07:21 PM
In return for your amusing flash animation, I offer you this.
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0 votes
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Gable Gobble 9,232 13
11/04/2004 01:23 AM
The original flash animation had my head coming off, plus it had a gootch shot of some chick, so it was rated NC-17. I had to clean it up.
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0 votes
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Rory McKay 274 9
11/04/2004 09:43 PM
Love the Flash animation. Well done (C++)
But I don't see the relevance of the photo of the Valencia orange with a scar.
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0 votes
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Oliver Turkeybreast 203,475 12
11/05/2004 12:20 AM
Holy Shakespeare Gabe. That was Frostin awesome.
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0 votes
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Modesta 76 8
11/08/2004 09:50 PM
Was your dad the type to try to pull out loose teeth with floss and a hammer? Mine was.
He also stitched up my brother and re-set a couple dislocated fingers.
He works as a materials distributor for PG&E. I'm lucky I am still in possesion of all of my limbs.
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