Accident-schmacident, I am invincible!
To say I was accident prone when I was younger is selling things a bit short. Accident inevitable is more like it. Who am I kidding…I’m still the most clumsy person I know. Poor decisions made on the fly and always tending to leap before I look was/is often the cause of my many disasters. But some were completely and hilariously out of my control.
As I have mentioned before- I was a swimmer when I was younger. The gangly limbs and 5’10” frame that plagued me in my everyday life seemed to coalesce and find its rhythm in the pool. Whilst I could easily trip over an ant on dry land, swimming for me was like a well rehearsed symphony. My body just got it. It still gets it, just a bit older and slower these days.
This particular incident took place when I was about 16 and readying myself for the first swim meet of the season. I had spent the weekend before at my best friend’s house and we did the typical things teenaged girls do when you’re hopped up on sugar, hormones and not enough sleep with no parental supervision. I can’t remember whose genius idea it was, but sometime during our weekend long haze my best friend and I thought it would be just the best thing in the whole world to write all over our hands and legs with indelible marker. I’m not talking Sharpies here either. I’m talking about the industrial, big as a baby’s arm, jet-fuel-scented behemoth markers used for…what, exactly? I still don’t know.
Completely ignoring the warning on the side of the marker that clearly stated DO NOT APPLY TO SKIN, we went to town. Giggling and laughing at every stroke of the pen. Writing ridiculous inside jokes up and down our bodies like women possessed. The Pièce de résistance was a massive cock & balls my friend drew down my left thigh that grew and looked as though it was jizzing on my knee when I would bend my leg. We were particularly proud of that one. High brow? Not so much.
You’d think after that weekend, and the fact that I spent a majority of my life in a swimsuit, that someone would have made mention of the inane scribblings all over me. But you’d think wrong. I went through the whole week with not one word mentioned by anyone about the writing on my hands or the giant wang on my leg, until that Friday; the day of the meet.
All the sports teams at my school had this silly tradition of dressing up they day you had a game/match. Something about taking pride in your sport and looking the part, blahblahblah. Here I am, dressed in a skirt and heels (how was this going to help me again?) kinda thinking I’m hot shit- still with black marks showing through my panty hose, when one of my teammates sees me between class in the hallway and calls me over to talk. She tells me about some new rule about athletes and visible tattoos whilst competing. Yeah, and? She thinks you can get in trouble or disqualified for having writing on your body too.
Shit.
I panic. No one had said anything to me the whole fucking week and suddenly halfway through school the day of the meet, someone springs this on me. I try and fail to find my friend to tell her, she’s nowhere.
Shit, shit shit.
Cut to the pool. One hour before the start of the meet. Having already warmed up, I’m in the locker room frantically scrubbing my hands and legs with soap and a loofah. It’s coming off my hands, but not my legs. Nothing is working. I try shampoo, lotion and everything else within reach to try and get it off me. I scrub harder, I scratch and tear at my skin. I even try shaving. But there it still is…the now slightly disfigured but still very plain as day, expertly drawn, veiny knob. My skin is so red and raw now it almost appears to be throbbing and glowing. Mocking me and my stupidity. My best friend suddenly appears at my side, her skin as fresh and clean as a baby’s ass. How the hell did that happen? It just came off, she says. IT JUST CAME OFF! Help me then! Get something, anything- so I can compete today! Ask Coach, maybe there’s something in the office.
She leaves and returns to my side in less than a minute, with a spray bottle full of flourescent green liquid. What is it? She doesn’t know. Coach said just to spray it on, leave it for a second and it should come off easily.
This friends is, in hindsight, where I should have asked a few more questions, or at the very least read the side of the goddamn bottle. But no. My hysteric brain wouldn’t have been able to process anything more at the time. So I just start squirting. And kept squirting. I probably used a quarter of the bottle before it started…
The blinding, searing, vagina-shriveling pain. Yes, being that I was wet and not very careful about where I was applying this death-juice, I not only sprayed it copiously over my legs, I got some of it all up in my hoo-hah. I produce a blood curdling scream and collapse on the floor quivering. My friend tries to help and turns the shower head towards my shuddering body. I cry out again, though the pain and burning is so severe now my voice is just barely above a whisper this time. Suddenly, I realize my Coach is at my side asking my friend what happened. My friend shrugs and says she doesn’t know what happened, I just used the stuff he had given her. Coach’s eyes widen and he says he didn’t know it was for me, he thought it was for a wall or something, I never should have sprayed it on myself because-
IT’S A FUCKING TURPENTINE SOLUTION! Yay! Chemical burns! What fun.
Coach finds a parent to take me to the emergency room as my mum hadn’t yet arrived at the pool, and I am rushed to the hospital. But not before (get this) my ass master Coach says to the parent to try and have me back before the start of the meet! Fucking seriously?! Priorities, anyone?
I’m taken to the ER, but because I am underage and the parent who has brought me doesn’t have consent from my mother to have me treated, I am handed a single Benadryl and sent along my way. Good for you American Medical Establishment! A panicked, soaking wet, swimsuit clad teenaged girl comes into your ER -with what is a very obvious chemical burn- and you give her a cunting Benadryl! Way to go. I bet you feel really good about yourself for that.
In the end, I did make it back to the pool just in time for my first race. I managed to qualify for State Championships, break two longstanding school records and get a personal best time.
All while sporting an angry lobster red chemical burned slightly faded jizzing dick down my left thigh.
Say that five times fast.
the pissed on series…childhood trauma #422
My mum didn’t really monitor my reading materials when I was young so much as just let me read whatever the hell I wanted. Age appropriateness wasn’t really in her vernacular. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t snuggling down with Penthouse Forum at bedtime, she would typically read the synopsis on the back of the book and then just let me get on with it. To be fair, a lot of what I was reading at age 10 or 11 were things she knew and had read herself, so she didn’t have a lot to worry about. This changed with Stephen King.
So here I am, at 10, reading IT. Being an only child, it was so, so easy for me to let my imagination run wild. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters to bounce off or torture so it was all left up to me. I was fine to start. Fascinated by the macabre, even that young and getting really into the whole thing.
Then comes the violence, the kids dying, the old houses and that fucking clown! Here’s me, same age as the kids in the book, reading about them, slipping further away from myself every time I crack the binding. Imagination running, running, running. And let’s be honest here, scaring the shit out of myself with every page read.
If you’ve not read it, here’s the low down. Ancient mystical creature (disguised as a jolly circus clown, thank you very much, Mister King) feeds off children and hunts them through the city’s sewer system. The large Victorian pipes making it easy for said creature to move about…fucking ANYWHERE. And there’s a bit where there’s a little girl using the toilet and the creature tries to pull her down through the u-bend and ends up breaking her neck…
(as an aside. adult me thinks ‘who the holy fuck leans closer when they hear voices coming out of the freaking toilet!?’ run, motherfucker, run!)
Where do I live? Old ass house. With ancient piping. How old am I? Same as the kids in the book. This. fucking. creature. is. coming. to. get. me. Why can’t I put this fucking book down? Please mum, why won’t you tell me I’m not allowed to read this shit!? Oh no, another kid’s died….toilet bad. Water bad…Why am I torturing myself? Burn it with fire!
The long and short of all this, is somewhere in my infantile brain I started equating using the toilet with dying a tortuous death. But the sink? The sink was my salvation. The sink provided me a quiet space where I could keep a damn close eye on anything that might come oozing out of the bowl and run like hell if it did. I could prop my little bum right up there and give the finger to the ancient creature and y’know, not pee my pants. So, screw you, mister asshole clown! You won’t get me! I’ve figured you out and I’m smarter than you.
Until my mum caught me doing it.
As was/is her way, my mum was less mad and more amused by the whole situation. Through chuckles she explained that nothing was going to jump up and bite my ass while I was trying to snip some cable. And at the end of the day ALL THE PIPES ARE CONNECTED ANYWAY! Thanks for that. So she says, stop pissing in the sink, I know you’re 10 and scared shitless, but it’s gross and you are old enough to know this stuff isn’t real.
Talked down from my sinky perch, I agreed to start using the toilet like a normal person. (Though it didn’t stop me from taking a sabbatical behind the barn if need be.)
Thereafter though, as was the norm with her, anytime I would have to go to the bathroom my mum would stand outside the bathroom door knock very lightly and whisper, ‘We all float down here. Weeee alllll flooooat!’ Having read just enough of the book to fuck with me.
It’s surprising I’m not completely mad.
Suppository Silent Treatment
I wasn’t a sickly child, but when I did get ill I seemed to do it extraordinarily well. When I was about ten I came down with a bout of meningitis and spent six days in the hospital. Nothing huge; just fluids and antibiotics and pukeing on five or six different people in quick succession and a lumbar puncture that was oh-so-much fun. Most kids might freak out about a hospital stay but because my mum was in medicine I was used to the environment, and my biggest memory from the whole ordeal was being pissed off that the day I was going to be allowed solid foods (finally!), they discharged me. I still rue the day I didn’t get my hospital pancakes and fruit cup!
Anyway…
Cut to a week later and I have to go in for a quick check up with my mum to make sure my preadolescent engine was ticking over as it should. The nurse asked all the typical questions; was I eating, how was I sleeping, did I seem to be getting back to my old self, was I using the toilet regularly. All yes. Except. Except what? Well, I was going to the toilet, but I told the nurse my tummy hurt because I hadn’t pooped in about a week.
The nurse took this in stride, said that it was sometimes normal not to poo because my little body had been through the ringer, she had just the thing to help push it along the way. She then turned around and grabbed two small pill-like things from a drawer behind her and set them aside. She then said she was going leave the room for a minute while I took off my pants and put on a hospital gown.
Okay, this is where my brain really starts heading into overdrive. Was I going back into the hospital? Why did I need to put a gown on? Why did I only have to take my pants off to take some pills? That was weird. Never shy, I asked my mum.
Me: Why do I have to take my pants off to take the medicine?
Mum: Well, those are called suppositories and in order for them to work, you have to put them in your bum. (Never one to mince words, my mother.)
Me: *SHOCKHORROR* WHY?!? IN MY BUTT?? BY THOR’S HAMMER (I was really into Norse mythology, even at ten) WHY …IN MY BUTT …MOOOOOM!? Noooooo!
At this point, with my mother stifling a laugh, the nurse returned to the room and asked me to lay down on my side and draw my knees up to my chest and we would get this done. I think may have started crying at this point, not from fear, but from the sheer inability to conceive why people would stick things UP THEIR BUTT to feel better. I think because of this the nurse then asked me if I would feel more comfortable if my mum ‘administered the medicine’. Immediately my mother protested with an emphatic ‘I’m not doing it’ with that tone in her voice that I knew I shouldn’t argue and just get this whole debacle over with.
It was over before it started- and as anal probes go, I reckon it could have been a lot worse but that didn’t change the fact that I was now very, very upset with my mum. So much so, I refused to speak with her on the drive home. And then for the following three days.
On the fourth day of the UPMYBUTT scandal I heard mum on the phone in the other room speaking to my GramCracka, filling her in on all the sordid details of my previous illness and the subsequent doctor’s visit…
Mum: …I don’t know, Ma. She’s a tough kid. I mean she managed a giant needle in her spine without flinching the week before, there had to have been something about the suppos….here she is, why don’t you ask her.
Mexican stand-off moment; mum holding the phone out to me and me attempting to give her the stinkiest of stink-eyes I could muster. I walked slowly over to her outstretched hand and took the phone. I exchanged pleasantries with GramCracka for a minute and then she asked me why I was busting my mum’s chops so badly.
I looked down and started mumbling something, but then in a fit of lucidity I burst out with BECAUSE SHE WOULDN’T STICK HER FINGERS IN MY BUM, SHE MADE THE NURSE DO IT!
Then suddenly- probably realizing how ridiculous I was being once I finally said it out loud- I looked up at my mum and devolved into fits of giggles, unable to contain myself.
Also, if you’re wondering (and I know you are) I pooped about two hours after we arrived home from the appointment. I deserve a trophy.
