“It was a very serious gash in my leg”
When I was 13, I had a scimitar-esque sword that I would play with because I was super into anime and action movies for the main character would be fighting off hordes of enemies with just his trusty blade, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
So I would play with that thing in my room late at night, and unsurprisingly, one of the nights I was playing with it, I got myself quite badly because it was a sharp and pointy blade. So, when I did end up getting myself, it was because I pulled off that action movie move where the main character stabs somebody behind him because he’s just so in the zone that he can like sense their presence.
I got myself in the hip, and I couldn’t feel it. I think my body went into like a protective shock right away, but I knew that I had done it. So I rushed into the bathroom and right when I saw how bad it was, I started panicking because it was about two inches in diameter and like half an inch deep, so it was a very serious gash in my leg.
And my family had like first aid kits in all the bathrooms, so I wrapped myself up really good, really tight and left the bathroom a big mess. And I just went to bed after that. I was still in middle school. I still had chores to do. So I would be moving around with it. And I never told an adult about this until years later when I was sure that I wouldn’t be punished or scolded for my embarrassing actions because I was just so embarrassed. But it was a very like deathly wound.
At a time about a month in, I unwrapped it to see how it was doing. It was doing poorly. It was healing, but it was gross looking, like it looked like something that a doctor needed to see and even then, I just wasn’t going to tell anyone. My body did eventually just heal it all the way up. The scar is very strange; it looks kind of like a potato. But I didn’t die, which is surprising. The more I explain the story to people, the more people tell me that I was probably just letting an infected wound gnash away at my leg.
But my favorite part to tell about the story is how I never found the missing part of my leg because I only started looking for it about two weeks later. And my only working theory is that my dog ate it. And I think that’s just the best part about this, it’s like the circle of life in the tale. Everything goes back to your dog’s food bowl.
