This Nostalgic Life #35
Childhood Injuries
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Welcome to the 35th issue of This Nostalgic Life. In this issue, we’re telling stories of our childhood injuries. Luckily we didn’t suffer any long-term physical effects, but the scars are still on our souls. When you’re done reading these tales, drop us a comment and tell us about an injury you suffered as a kid!
I Had My Thumb Broken Playing Titty Twister At Bible School
by Mick Lee
I bet that’s a title you never thought you’d read in a newsletter like this. But I’d also bet that it at least piques your interest just a little bit too. When Eric and I were discussing the theme for this issue, I casually texted him that title and immediately got back a LMAO message. I followed that up with a text saying, “I never thought a time would come when it would be fit to tell that story, but here we are.”
So yeah, I had my thumb broken playing titty twister at bible school.
It was the summer of 1988. School had been out for a few weeks and my days had been filled with various adventures. My friends who lived on my road spent the days riding our bikes from one end to the other during the day, and my evenings were spent on the front porch watching the bug zapper do its thing. But one of the summer traditions in my life was spending several weeks attending bible school.
If you’re not familiar with what bible school is, let me give you a brief rundown. During the summer months when school is out, most churches host a week of bible school. This takes place in the late evenings and is usually made up of some kind of class, followed by a craft project, and the whole week usually is part of a theme of some kind.
My Mom was all about being at church as much as possible, so whether I wanted to attend bible school or not didn’t matter. I was going. And not only was I going to bible school at our church, but she would arrange for me to go with my cousins to bible school at their churches as well. And that is where this tale takes place.
I have an older cousin named Stevie. You may remember him as the protagonist from the Appalachian Christmas Carol audio presentation in issue #30 of This Nostalgic Life. While he could be a real piece of work, his mother has always been a wonderful lady. And back in those days she was a Sunday School teacher at her church. It was a no-brainer that I was going to be going to their bible school.
The week of bible school was ok as far as bible school goes. I can’t remember much about what the theme was, or what the classes entailed, or what the crafts were like. What I can remember though is my cousin Stevie picking on me the whole week. And Stevie encouraged his friends to pick on me too.
Their main modes of attack were the classic bully gimmicks like noogies, Indian burns, and flicking my ears. Stevie took things up a notch by adding in titty twisters whenever he could. You know, where you pinch someone’s nipple and twist real hard. The giver gets a kick out of watching the receiver dance around in pain, while the receiver…well, the receiver just dances around in pain.
I didn’t do much to fight back against this bullying since there were three of them and just one of me. But when we got to the final night, that changed. Stevie’s friends left after the final night party, and I seized on the opportunity to get a little revenge. While standing in the parking lot, I grabbed a handful of Stevie’s nipple and twisted it with everything I had.
The look of horror on his face was matched only by the scream of pain he let out. Now I don’t know if it was the pain or the thought that I had the audacity to fight back against his bullying, but either way, there was fire in his eyes as he drew back a fist. He swung for the fences at my face, but I managed to sway to save my face, and threw up a hand to block his shot. Unfortunately, his shot landed full force against my thumb on the hand I threw up to block it. My thumb bent backward in a way that God never intended.
Fortunately for me, his mom came on the scene at that point, and Stevie’s attack ended just as quickly as it had begun. He cursed under his breath in the backseat of the car as they drove me to my house. I got out of the car and headed into the house with the satisfaction of what I had done. But then, the pain in my thumb set in. And it was a throbbing pain.
I told my folks about it, avoiding telling the whole story, but they got the point and took me to get checked out. As the doctor pulled and prodded my thumb, he could tell there was real pain there from my reactions. An x-ray confirmed his suspicions of a broken thumb. A small cast was applied from my thumb to a couple of inches past my wrist. Wearing a cast is inconvenient enough on its own, but the timing of getting this one was really bad.
Two days after the cast was applied, our family left on a two-week road trip to Canada and Nova Scotia. It was part vacation and part business trip for my dad. I had just gotten a handheld video game for the trip and now I couldn’t use my thumb to play it in the car. But I learned to reach my index finger over to the directional pad and make it work.
That vacation was a bummer as I couldn’t do a lot of the things we had planned on. But the experience taught me a valuable lesson, and that was either “don’t play titty twister at bible school”, or “don’t block a punch with your hand”. I’ll leave it to you the readers to decide which is the moral of this story.
Second Grade Trauma
by Eric Vardeman
Second grade was a rather traumatic time for me, physically. I was between the ages of seven and eight and we were living in the little town of Duncan, Oklahoma, at the time. My second-grade teacher was Mrs. Cunningham at Horace Mann Elementary (none of that information matters to the stories, I just like to remember). Two major incidents happened around my second-grade year that basically scarred me for life, physically and psychologically.
Incident #1: the first incident happened on the school playground. We had a domed jungle gym on the playground much like the one in the picture below. It stood roughly 12 feet tall and, to four-foot-tall second graders, it was a skyscraper. Not many had the stomach to climb all the way to the top and sit on the edge of the top ring and dangle their feet. Even fewer had the stomach to sit backward at the edge and then slowly lower themselves backward till they were hanging upside down, hands-free, with their knees hooked over the bar.
One day, I finally mustered enough courage to do just that. All was well. I lowered myself backward, took a deep breath, and let go of the bar. I swung there in free space. What I hadn’t given any thought to was how to get back up from that position. As I reached up for the bar again to pull myself up, my body slipped free from the jungle gym, and I plummeted to the earth. There wasn’t anything soft to break my fall, just the dirt. It was the first time I had the wind knocked out of me. I landed flat on my back. It’s a wonder I didn’t land on my head and break my neck. I sat up on my knees, gasping for breath. One of the playground monitors came running over to attend to me. When I was finally able to breathe again, she asked me if I was ok. I mean…my back hurt but I could breathe again so I guess I’m ok, right? She dusted me off and sent me on my way. No “let’s go see the nurse” or “let’s take it easy”. In true GenX fashion, I never told my parents even though I remember my back hurting for not only the rest of the day but for several days. That didn’t stop me from trying the same stunt again, though, after the pain went away. Years later, I looked up what that back pain could have been, and turns out I probably had a minor herniated disc. I’m nearly convinced that my lingering lower back pain throughout my life is related to that incident.
Incident #2: Later that year, I contracted chicken pox. And not just a mild case. I had the mother of all cases. Even my pediatrician was amazed. I had them EVERYWHERE. All over my body, in my ears, in my nostrils, on my eyelids, between my fingers and toes. I was plagued for nearly a week and a half. I missed two weeks of school. A good portion of my days was spent in the bathtub with a warm oatmeal bath (my Star Wars action figures and ships spent a lot of time in the water) and when I wasn’t in the bathtub I was covered in pink Caladryl. I remember being totally miserable.
I still have three very prominent scars on my body several of the bigger sores: one on my chest, behind one of my ears, and one on my leg. For some strange reason that still eludes us to this day, my sister, who is six years younger than me, thought it looked like great fun to have chicken pox and tried everything in her power to infect herself. She drank after me, used utensils after me, anything and everything she could figure out to do. I remember the grin on her face when my parents found the beginnings of sores on her stomach. And while her case wasn’t nearly as severe as mine, it didn’t take her long to realize that chicken pox wasn’t as fun as she had seemingly built it up to be in her mind.
Thank you for joining us for this issue. We hope you’ve gotten some enjoyment from reading about the pains of our youth. If you have your own story to tell, we’d love for you to leave us a comment and share it with us. Until next time, be careful what games you play at bible school!
I never had any broken bones as a kid (though I did have the chickenpox), but I remember straining my wrist in 6th grade. There was a park on the way home from school and even though I was supposed to come straight home I stopped by there to play. I was on the merry-go-round and jumped off mid-spin, but my hand didn't want to join me, bending way back. Of course when I told my dad after that, the only thing he heard was that I didn't come straight home and I got grounded.