13
During my many gaps between temp jobs, Jeff asked if I could help him
as he worked late nights and off days at his father's dry-cleaning
chain. The chain was undergoing dramatic growth and one of Jeff's
duties was to make sure the shops where set-up and operating properly
to save on hiring outside help. While Jeff didn't mind doing this,
he was concerned that something might happen to him, such as a cap
blowing off of a steam pipe, and no one would be around to call for
an ambulance. So he asked me to join him at these work times to
effectively be on watch for his safety and occasionally serve as a
second set of hands. In return he'd pay for pizza and once in a
while invite me to expand my wardrobe from long forgotten items in
the chain's lost & found boxes.
It was one of these times, a Sunday afternoon when Jeff was building
the customer service desk at a new store, that I was
the one that got injured. We were carrying in a full sheet of heavy
plywood into the shop and had to make a sharp corner, I was the one
walking backward while Jeff pushed from behind and my right wrist
became pinched between the doorway and the edge of the board. At
first Jeff didn't realize it was my flesh holding up progress and
gave it a good shove to get it passed the obstruction. I had to
tell him to stop. You see, for some reason I never learned to
cry out when in trouble and instead would just get quiet. Being a
stutterer I avoided talking anyhow, so people rarely noticed the
difference between when I was in trouble and when I was doing fine.
I had to ignore the pain of having my wrist pinched & smushed by
having to speak up and say, ''Stop!'' I asked Jeff to pull the
plywood back out of the doorway to free my wrist and then we finished
bringing it in with me only using my left hand.
My right wrist first turned red with the scraped skin in velvety
waves above. Jeff asked if I was okay and I told him I'd be fine,
and thus he went to work while I picked-out a tape of music to play
in the tape deck as he worked. By the time he had finished a good
chunk of the work needed, we went to a next door pizza place for a
sit down meal and that's when we realized the red scraped area of my
right wrist was now a bulging blue mass. Jeff wondered if I should
see a doctor, but as I knew I couldn't afford it, I glossed it over
by telling Jeff I had a worse injury happen to my left wrist and
pointed to where I had a prominent scar that I had gained in my
Freshman year of High School. The thing was, I realized at that
moment that the scar had significantly faded to be just a small patch
of discolored skin. It made it harder for me to sell to Jeff that it
had been worse than my right wrist was now.
This was when I started to first wonder about strange things in my
health. Such as the ragged patches of itchy skin during my
elementary school years that, once the itching was gone, had healed
without a trace. My burst left eardrum that, once the scabbing
debris had been removed by the doctor a month or so after the fact,
was found to be a still working eardrum. And now my badly scarred
left wrist that was just a shadow on my skin. Within another five
years, that shadow would be gone and people would doubt me when I'd
try to tell them of the time I'd gotten injured in wood shop at
school. Ten years later, I'd tell doctors about my burst left
eardrum and they would take a look and then call me a liar because
they found no trace that it had even been burst. And now, at this
time in Nineteen Eighty-Four when my scraped & smushed right
wrist healed...
I once thought these sorts of injuries were permanent, that
they were forever. Others did too and apparently as I'm
different in one obvious way, I'm different in others. If you
take a look at the inside of your wrist, you'll likely see this
bulging blue vein that emerges from your forearm and reaches the base
of your palm where it splits into the various smaller veins crossing
your palm and reaching your fingers. When my right wrist was injured
by the plywood, that injury had crushed and torn-up that vein and the
blood was pooling under my skin at the wrist as it no longer had a
clear path to follow into my forearm. But I didn't know this at the
time, only figured this out after the fact and I couldn't see
anything beyond the swelling blue mass at my wrist.
Over the course of many days, if not a few weeks, it stayed there
like that until it finally started to resolve and the swollen blue
mass withdrew to reveal that something I never would have imagined
had happened. Where once I had a vein going from my right palm to my
right forearm, I now had many veins that split apart where the injury
had taken place, then meet back up at a single point when entering
the wrist.
For years, when I'd tell people my stories of scars that disappear
and burst eardrums that repaired, they'd have their doubts. So then
I'd tell them the story of my wrist using my left wrist as I talk
about the vein and the injury I had, then end the story by showing
them the many little veins that spread apart and reached back up on
my right wrist. For some, this is a moment when they'd go, ''Wow.''
For others they just call me a liar and tell me I must have
been born with my right wrist veins like that.
Such is life.
As I type this, now twenty-eight years after the injury, those many
little veins have slowly continued to change and merge into just two
obvious veins. In another twenty-eight years would they have finally
merged back into the original single vein? I will never know.
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