Vitamin E

This is a Narrative Essay focused on the malleability of our earliest memories, and suggests readers to examine those memories and the effects they have had on their character and actions.

            We talked about what I wanted for Christmas on the way to the hospital as more blood than I figured the body of three-year-old me contained leaked from the gash in my forehead onto my brand new, grey sweatpants. The examining room was far too bright and made me anxious, but not as anxious as the lead-filled blue blanket of doom the doctor presented me with as a means of keeping me still while he operated on me, which was thankfully never used. My dad explained to me that my forehead was like the tea towel I had used as a compress, which was damp still with water and blood, but mostly blood. The poor thing had been white once; it was now almost black and had a rip in one corner. Mom would have to stitch that up if she wanted it to be better again, my father explained�"to the extent she wanted to keep it, which I couldn’t imagine she would�"and the doctor had to stitch me up, too, if I wanted to get better again.

            These are the things I remember from the night, roughly two weeks before Christmas Eve of 1996: the night my forehead was introduced to the corner of the sixth stone stair of my family’s home in North Carolina. The stair cut through my flesh, through the wall of muscle, through the layer of fat babies were fortunate enough to be born with�"for this purpose, I imagine�"and scratched my skull. My father had been right behind me on the stairs and just missed me when I fell. He grabbed the tea towel from the kitchen, soaked it in cold water, and told me to keep it pressed against my forehead as he buckled me into my car seat and sped me off to the hospital. When my father tells me this story, which he does every so often, he interjects here that my stoicism and bravery was a remarkable feat of physical and mental courage on my part. 

            We did indeed talk about what I wanted for Christmas on the way to the hospital, something like a thirty-minute drive. According to my father, I didn’t cry once. By the time we reached the hospital, my sweatshirt and pants were soaked with blood, but the bleeding had nearly stopped. My father told me to keep the towel pressed against my forehead anyways and went to the receptionist to check me in, who told him that it would be a few hours before the doctor could see me. My father came back, let me know we would have to wait a while, and had me take a nap on his knee which I gratefully accepted and promptly bled on.

            About 30 minutes later, a frighteningly concerned African American woman woke me with several very loud cries of, “This baby’s bleeding! Someone take care of this baby, right now!” It took my father and I a little while to figure out that these cries were on my behalf. I was promptly moved to a large, white, obnoxiously bright and curiously empty examination room. After a while I was transferred to the operating room using what appeared at first to be a blue plastic stretcher, but turned out to be a sinister device which was something like a weighted, blue neoprene toddler-tortilla to keep me from wiggling too much and complicating the doctor’s job of applying thirteen stitches to my three-year-old forehead. My dad declined for me, suggesting that I would wiggle more if I was wrapped up than if I was left alone. The doctor agreed skeptically not to use it and, since my age made the use of anesthetic too dangerous, proceeded without anesthetic and without incident to apply the sutures. My father says I didn’t move once, didn’t even cry, and uses this as another opportunity to compliment me on my bravery and physical courage and trust.

I have not, as I mentioned, told this story from my memories thereof, but from my father’s; my secondhand memories. And yet, the effects of the story as it has been told to me�"not as I remember�"have been extraordinary.

Years later, my father told me to try my hand at baseball. I was tall for my age, and had decent accuracy and speed on the ball. I showed real promise, my father used to say. In one game I remember, my family was all there to watch, and I was playing right field. Usually, in Little League, the ball doesn’t travel much farther than the infield; this was a rare exception. I was invincible, I was stoic, I was brave, I was stupid and I was headed for the hospital about as fast as the little white blur was headed straight for my teeth. I fell into the grass, bleeding from my upper lip and running my tongue over three chipped teeth, and crying. “Why didn’t you put your glove up, son?”

I didn’t have a good answer to my father’s question, just another good story and another good scar.