Thursday, October 7, 2010

It's Just a Flesh Wound...

Not that it explains any of my oddness, but I was once shot in the head. It was a friendly fire incident, the worst of all reasons to get shot. It was Easter of 1982, I think, and the emergency room was quiet compared to many of the other times I visited there. They saved the projectile that they dug out of my skull for me in one of those urine sample jars, which is now labeled and lost among the boxes and drawers of memories. I was so lucky…

My friend Adam lived in KC with his dad during the week and came out to his mom’s on weekends. We would pal around, hiking, hunting, camping, stalking, mini-biking and all that other fun stuff on the quarter section of wooded hillside between our houses. We build hay forts and tree stands and hydro-engineering projects in the ditch just for the fun of it. Anything we could figure out to do with firecrackers, we did. He brought some bottle rockets from home and we would take turns shooting at each other as we zipped by on the mini-bike. Being the young engineer I was, I made a launcher with a flag pole, capped at one end, a hole cut to light the fuse, and a tennis ball can as a flash suppressor, which gave the game some surprisingly close calls. But it was all harmless.

You might be thinking 1982, what were you doing with a firearm? But I was living “in the country”, a couple miles outside of town where boys and guns went together like, well, boys and guns! And our arsenal was comprised of pellet and BB guns, hardly lethal, at least to boys. Now pigeons and grasshoppers might fall prey to the mighty guns every now and then, a squirrel once and a lot of cans, but nothing much bigger than a shoe. This particular spring, we had gone down to the pond to shoot (at) frogs. I had left the nice .22 caliber pellet gun at the house, preferring the cheaper ammo of BB guns. The drawback of BB’s are their accuracy, saving the lives of countless critters. When we ran out of BB’s, we tried hunting them down with pocket knives, and when that fun wore off, we started to trudge back home, me in the lead. Adam had a CO2 powered BB pistol, with a 50 or so shot reservoir for BB’s, and you could shake and hear the rattle of your remaining shots. Well, since we had long exhausted our ammo, firearm discipline had lapsed, and for no reason that anyone can explain, Adam took aim at me from 30 feet or so and pulled the trigger. Hey, it was empty, right? Well that puff of compressed air pushed the real last BB out of the chamber on a trajectory towards me. Continuing in the series of unlikely events, the .177 caliber slug, travelling at hundreds of feet per second, founds it make, me, striking me in the back of the head, several inches behind my ear! I thought I had been stung by a wasp, and flinched, bringing my hand up to my head as I turned around. The shocked look on Adam’s face (and the gun pointed at me) quickly informed me to what had happened. Not content with giving me a welt or just a small flesh wound, the BB pierced my skin and imbedded itself between my scalp and skull a good inch from the entry point. I told Adam not to worry, I would tell the parents that it was a ricochet, so he wouldn’t get in (too much) trouble, and turned and ran the rest of the way back to my house, where I told my mom I was shot. Shocked, she cleaned up the blood, scalp wounds are bleeders, to find a tiny hole and a bump, and after tying for several minutes to move the BB back to the hole, decided this might be best left to the professionals, and loaded me up in the car and we headed to the Emergency Room. There, after a requisite wait, a local was injected and a small X was cut to remove the BB. And continuing the cover up, I had to get a tetanus shot (since it had bounced off the ground). After returning home, I found Adam waiting on the back porch with his mom, and a large basket of Easter apology candy.

Well, it sits in a plastic jar labeled “The BB that got me, Easter ‘82” and is packed away somewhere next to the chunks of cartilage from my first knee surgery, a reminder of how lucky I was.

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