The injury: A finger that snapped in half like a dry twig.
The story: As I mentioned in the first installment of this ill-conceived miniseries, my parents sent me to a daycare almost everyday for a period of almost 9 years. If memory serves me correct, this daycare was filled with some of the most dumbshit ignorant old people I've ever had the misfortune of knowing - our bus driver was a 70-something year old man who had a habit of sitting down in the middle of our playroom and clipping his yellowed old man toenails, and one of the staff members was an elderly lady who went on frequent diatribes against the music industry and how she thought it was a cardinal sin that they didn't rate CDs the same way they rate movies.
Apparently this isn't a thing?
The children were just as weird - there was a prolific kleptomaniac tomboy from Russia, the boy with debilitating asthma and about 6 different speech disorders, some kid named Juan who once bit my arm so hard that I squirted blood into his mouth, and a small child who had a frightening habit of eating every single thing he could get his disgusting little hands on. Wood chips, dead wasps, markers, rocks, worms, crayons, everything went down this kid's throat like it was a garbage disposal. This kid is important to the story. We'll call him Rainbow Tongue.
Imagine this, but with more insect innards.
Apart from strange people, our playground was also home to a big ass tire swing. Said tire swing was suspended by three uncovered chains. The problem is that uncovered chains on a playground are a really bad idea. For those of you unfamiliar with kids, children can, and will, find a way to wedge one or more of their appendages into just about every nook and cranny that they can find (that's what she said? Wait, no, we're talking about kids here. Oh God. Forget I said that).
It happened instantaneously. The moment I raised my hands, some unknown force yanked me off of the ground, and suddenly I was very comparable to a pigeon caught in a tornado. My world became a blur as the tire swing picked me up and swung me through the air, and the only thing more surprising than my sudden flight was the blinding amount of pain shooting through my hand and legs. I've always been a big kid, and I was just tall enough that when I started flailing in circles like a rag doll, my legs smashed into the wooden supports that upheld the swing. After about 5 rotations in the air, I came to an abrupt halt, as my trajectory took a sudden downturn and I smashed into the sand with my shins. My vision blurred with tears, I cast my gaze about and discovered what had caused me to go airborne. My finger had apparently gotten caught in one of the chain links upholding the tire swing, and in the process of attempting to rip off my finger, the link accidentally picked up the rest of my body. Despite the fact that I was going fast enough to escape Earth's gravity well, my finger was simply too stubborn to disconnect with the rest of my hand, opting instead to hang on for dear life and simply see what happened. Dizzy with pain, I slowly extricated my finger from the chain link. I successfully removed my digit, and was rather surprised when the end half of my finger immediately flopped out like an uncoordinated fish.
As I've mentioned again and again, I was an impressively stupid child, and at no point in my 8 years of existence had I conceived of the idea that bones could actually break. Indeed, I was convinced that bones were the end-all be-all of material strength, and was somewhat flabbergasted to discover that my ring finger had snapped like a popsicle stick. At least, I would have been, had I not immediately passed out and face planted into the sand.
I woke up approximately 2 seconds later and began howling like a banshee, because despite what some people would have you believe, breaking a finger really really hurts. Thankfully, it only took about 2 and a half minutes of incessant screaming for some of the daycare staff to come to my aid, where they began giving me proper medical attention. Which in this scenario means I got a firm scolding for being in the big kid's playground and a bag of ice to hold on my finger. After a bit of deliberation, the staff decided that it might be a good idea to give my parents a ring. Unfortunately for them, they decided to call my dad. I'll get to that in a second, but for now, just know that my dad looks a lot like this.
Being the little dipshit I was (am), I decided that a good way to pass the time while I waited for my dad to arrive would be to play with my now extraordinarily flexible finger. I did this for about 30 seconds, showing off my cool new trick to all of my friends, until I twitched and accidentally mashed my two broken bone ends together. That was a bit unpleasant.
My dad arrived and, following his typical modus operandi, immediately tracked down the daycare's elderly manager and threatened to beat her into a little granny pancake (I'm probably paraphrasing that a bit more than I should). Unbeknownst to me at the time, it turns out that leaving the playground unsupervised at a daycare center is the exact wrong thing to do. It's also exactly what they did. After reminding them of all the reasons why uncovered chains and unsupervised children are a really bad combination, my dad grabbed me by the shoulder and started leading me towards the car.
It was at this point, right before I passed through the fence gate and into the parking lot, that I began looking around for Rainbow Tongue. Having dipped into shock, I was barely coherent enough to reach the conclusion that this was all his fault and that I should really start hating him more. I found him, staring at me with horror, his eyes filled with guilt and overflowing with tears as he felt the unbearable responsibility for my pain and suffering seep into his system like arsenic.
Haha, just kidding. He was in the corner scooping handfuls of sand into his mouth.
So I was somewhere on the playground, waddling about as I was wont to do, when Rainbow Tongue came to me with a request. "Johann," he mumbled between mouthfuls of orange marker, "You're a big kid and the tire swing is spinning really fast and I wanna get on it. Can you stop it for me?"
I looked at his diminutive little form, then directly behind me, to where the tire swing was indeed spinning around quite fast. To this day I have no idea how it attained such a phenomenal velocity. Mumbling in acquiescence, I approached the whirling death tire and tentatively reached my palms into its general flight path, hoping to lightly tap the side of the tire and slow it down a little each time it passed my hands.
This is when the tire swing made a valiant effort to murder me.
The life expectancy of these children can be measured in seconds.
As I've mentioned again and again, I was an impressively stupid child, and at no point in my 8 years of existence had I conceived of the idea that bones could actually break. Indeed, I was convinced that bones were the end-all be-all of material strength, and was somewhat flabbergasted to discover that my ring finger had snapped like a popsicle stick. At least, I would have been, had I not immediately passed out and face planted into the sand.
In my defense, I probably drink enough milk for my skeleton to register as a 7 on the hardness scale.
I woke up approximately 2 seconds later and began howling like a banshee, because despite what some people would have you believe, breaking a finger really really hurts. Thankfully, it only took about 2 and a half minutes of incessant screaming for some of the daycare staff to come to my aid, where they began giving me proper medical attention. Which in this scenario means I got a firm scolding for being in the big kid's playground and a bag of ice to hold on my finger. After a bit of deliberation, the staff decided that it might be a good idea to give my parents a ring. Unfortunately for them, they decided to call my dad. I'll get to that in a second, but for now, just know that my dad looks a lot like this.
Being the little dipshit I was (am), I decided that a good way to pass the time while I waited for my dad to arrive would be to play with my now extraordinarily flexible finger. I did this for about 30 seconds, showing off my cool new trick to all of my friends, until I twitched and accidentally mashed my two broken bone ends together. That was a bit unpleasant.
My dad arrived and, following his typical modus operandi, immediately tracked down the daycare's elderly manager and threatened to beat her into a little granny pancake (I'm probably paraphrasing that a bit more than I should). Unbeknownst to me at the time, it turns out that leaving the playground unsupervised at a daycare center is the exact wrong thing to do. It's also exactly what they did. After reminding them of all the reasons why uncovered chains and unsupervised children are a really bad combination, my dad grabbed me by the shoulder and started leading me towards the car.
It was at this point, right before I passed through the fence gate and into the parking lot, that I began looking around for Rainbow Tongue. Having dipped into shock, I was barely coherent enough to reach the conclusion that this was all his fault and that I should really start hating him more. I found him, staring at me with horror, his eyes filled with guilt and overflowing with tears as he felt the unbearable responsibility for my pain and suffering seep into his system like arsenic.
Haha, just kidding. He was in the corner scooping handfuls of sand into his mouth.
