Back when I was eight years old, I lived with my mother on Gatineau street , where I was allowed to go out and play within a one-block area.
Of course, I wasn’t allowed to cross the street, so I stuck to my side along with the other kids my age, who were pretty much under the same rules.
We’d play in the alley behind my apartment building, where we could hear our mothers call us in for meals and the like.
On this occasion, one of my little comrades and I were trying to see each other through a long rusty metal pipe, maybe seven or eight feet long.
As we’re doing this, my friend’s mother calls out to him from the window above us.
Upon hearing her bellow and without warning, he drops his end of the pipe on the ground while I was still looking through it.
Needless to say, it bounced right back into my eye, opening a deep gash below it.
Upon seeing this, my cohort fled even faster and spurting blood everywhere through my tears, I ran upstairs and burst into the living room in a state of shock.
As my mother shrieked at the sight of me and grabbed her purse to take me to St-Justine’s Children Hospital, conveniently located just one block away, I recall leaving a tiny bloody handprint on the door while she fished around her purse for the house key to lock up.
Once in the emergency room at the hospital, I vividly remember fighting like a wildcat as they tried to sew up my eye with what struck me at the time as the world’s most enormous curved suture needle.
I figured in my tiny mind that if I kept moving my head around, they wouldn’t be able to go through with it.
Even with two nurses holding me down, they couldn’t restrain me enough to perform the procedure, so instead, they applied a butterfly adhesive dressing.
I left with my mom feeling somewhat victorious, reinforced in what was to become my lifelong and intense phobia of hypodermic needles of any kind.
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Excerpt from my upcoming e-book “Recollections from my time on earth” - Snackable short stories.
