Stitches in the Dark

It was February 6th, 2010. The same day as the huge snowstorm. Snowmageddon.

Our next door neighbors came over for dinner after a extremely fun-and snowy-snow day. There are five people in our neighbors family: a Mom and Dad, Caitlin and Daniel, who are both older than me, and Andrew and Brendan, who are my age. Daniel had a friend named Peter over that day, so we decided it would be fun to have him over also. The funny thing was that Daniel was a huge extrovert, but Peter was an introvert, but they still ended up getting along very well.

Peter, Daniel, Andrew, Brendan and I were all in the basement running around and playing tag. Suddenly, Daniel decided that it would be fun to play ball tag with the lights off. Daniel explained what ball tag was to us, and we were exhilarated because it sounded like so much fun-it wasn’t.

So we turned the lights off and Daniel started with the ball. I crawled to the back corner of the basement because I was scared of the dark. All I heard was a bunch of screaming and the crashing of the ball hitting the walls. I got really scared and started crawling back to the stairs to get upstairs. To do this, I had to crawl around the corner where the game was taking place.

As soon as I thought I had passed the corner, I suddenly felt a huge push at my side and I felt my head smack straight into the wall. I couldn’t feel any pain, but for some reason I started crying and flailing on the ground. They turned the lights back on once they heard me, and I could hear them saying things like “Oh, my god” and “Holy sh*t!” I was wondering what had happened to me that would make them say things like that, until I looked in the mirror.

I had a huge stream of blood that was coming down from the top of my forehead that was almost covering my eye entirely. I started freaking out and Daniel had to carry me upstairs to the parents. They set me down in a chair and used ice packs and paper towels to try and stop the bleeding. We were wondering if I had to go to the hospital or not. I was terrified of the hospital, so I was trying to convince my parents that I was alright. We ended up having to drive to the hospital during the huge snowstorm get stitches in my head.

As soon as we got to the hospital, we were rushed to the emergency room where they immediately laid me down and stuck a numbing needle in my forehead. I started screaming and my mom let me squeeze her hand while they were giving me the stitches.

Every time we hit a bump on the drive back, I got a shock of pain from my head, so my dad had to drive really slowly.

Once we got home, we checked in the basement to see if any damage had been done. We didn’t see anything until we turned the corner where I hit my head. There was a ginormous hole in the wall, and blood stains were all over the carpet.

~ Nick S.