Saturday, March 14, 2015

Knees, eyes and arms - Scars and injuries part 2.....

I'm sat on the sofa on a Saturday afternoon watching a classic old Carry on film - Carry on Cruising. One of the main characters is the ships doctor and it reminded me that I need to complete part 2 of my Scars and injuries posting.....

So lets start with an old injury from when I was a little boy...

Wood in my knee

Now I know this story isn't completely true, but what you read here is what I remember telling everyone as a kid, so its what the 6 year old me would say....

When we lived in Essex in when I was about 4 or 5 I learnt to ride a bike and soon afterwards would ride up and down the hill where we lived....(see this link for the actual hill - The hill )
Between the houses there was a few smaller pathways and bollards to stop people driving cars up them and it was down one of these pathways I was riding when I lost control and hit a wooden fence.

Now, I probably just fell of my bike and hurt my knee - but my memory tells me that I clattered THROUGH the fence and ended up limping home with a huge piece of wood sticking straight of of my leg. When I bravely made it home my mum and dad took me to hospital where the wood was removed - all apart from a small piece which was left inside my knee where it remains to this day. Obviously, this is all complete tosh and I doubt I have any wood in my leg and probably didn't even go to hospital. However, until a few years ago I did have a cool scar on my knee which has faded over the years and is very hard to spot nowadays  - can you see it?

The whiter spot marks the place where the wood is inside my  knee - haahaa honest!!

Roses and Eyelids

Around a year earlier something else a bit far fetched happened. However, I know that this one is true!!
I was ill with chicken pox I think and as such was off school and asleep on the sofa. As you see from the earlier story our house was on a hill and as such has steps in the back garden leading to the gate at the bottom. I was very itchy with  the spots from chicken pox and mum has put me naked in a cotton sheets to stop irritation from my clothes. I still wasn't happy though and decided to go outside to find my mum....

As I stepped into the garden I somehow fell down the steps and into the rose bushes that grew beside them The thorns from the bushes somehow managed to cut my eyelids. Now, this is where my younger self remembers being able to look out through the huge holes in my eyelids, but I know that this was most probably an exaggeration. What is true is that one of my eyelids was bleeding and until I grew up I did have some minor scarring on it. Again, its harder to see now that I'm a big boy, but I promise you that they are there!!

There are scars in between the wrinkles

Head scars that made me grow up!!

The next two scars changed my life. I wont go into too much detail about the circumstances, but if you are interested then don't hesitate to ask me personally I'm happy to sit down with a drink and go into detail of what was a very bad year or so for me. Luckily, what happened forced me to think about myself and made me into a better person. So I wouldn't change a thing.

I was in Germany when I was promoted in 1995 to Sergeant. However, I wasn't good at my job in my new rank. Some of the junior ranks at work didn't accept me as a Sergeant. One night I was on a night out in a local nightspot when an altercation took place and I was headbutted. Blood instantly started to flow from my head and without the help of one of the lads - who learnt to stop bleeding as a boxing trainer - the outcome could have been a lot worse. I ended up with three stitches in the head being sewn in by a medic in the army medical centre a couple of hours later - but as soon as I stood up, the stitches split and my bleed started again. I was put into a German ambulance and taken to the local hospital where a professional German doctor sewed me up properly. He saw my blood soaked clothes and estimated that I had lost about 2 pints of blood.

The scar that this left now sits proudly above my left eye and reminds me everyday about what happened. It changed my life for the better, but only after the second incident....

The bloke that headbutted me admitted assault in a military court and was sentenced to 8 months military jail. His friends blamed me and just a short time later one took his revenge. Believe it or not we were in the same nightspot when he followed me to the toilets and knocked me to the floor from behind. He then kicked me in the head. This opened a new would above my other eye, which luckily wasn't half as bad as the first injury.

Two scars - one story.
The story concluded about a year later when I left the unit during a 6 month tour in the Former Yugoslavia after the end of the Bosnian war. I had proved myself out there and moved on a better person. Unfortunately, my two assailants lives had also changed as they both served 8 months in jail.

School scars!
My last story is a short one and a simple one that you may be able to relate to...

When at secondary school, aged about 13 everyone had the infamous BCG jab to prevent getting Tuberculosis. Its a horrible jab, made up of 9 short needles that inject the vaccine into the upper forearm. It almost always leave a scar, but for me the jab took weeks to heal and for ages I had a yellow puss filled mess on my arm. It eventually healed but left a scar on my arm that most people my age can relate to.

The bottom bit is my BCG scar...
The reason I started thinking about all these things was the tooth that split a couple of weeks ago and featured in the previous post. I have to visit the dentist again this week and get the treatment completed with a new crown fitted. Hopefully, there wont be any more scars operations or trauma in the future...

Thanks for reading!!

1 comment:

  1. Ouch! Those are some scars you have. The condition of your knee is particularly worrying, since that's an ailment that hits means of mobility. The solution wouldn't merely take overnight, so might as well keep tabs on further developments and keep on with your treatments and medications. Take care!

    Agnes Lawson @ Pain Relief Experts

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