I wouldn’t necessarily say that I am accident prone, but as far as freak accidents go I have had a couple. The most notable of such occurrences happened when I was a senior in high-school. It was our last football game of the season. I remember that it rained heavy that day–there were two to three inches of standing water on the field by halftime. The game was a blowout: we must have beat the other team by 40 or more points. By halftime I started to notice a burning sensation in my rain-soaked pants. My initial thought was the burning was a result of chaffing from all the wetness. As the pain worsened my next thought was that scorpions had somehow found their way into my football pants. Although that sounds impossible, I assure you it was not–scorpions were prevalent where I lived, and I remember shaking them from freshly laundered clothes on more than one occasion. I pushed the pain aside, and after the game remember the team celebrating by diving headfirst into and sliding through the large puddles of water on the football field. I also remember the puddles eerily bubbling, almost as if they were boiling. After an extended period of celebration, I went home to shower. I remember stripping of my football attire and writhing in pain. I looked down at my thighs and almost collapsed at the sight. Both thighs had rows of deep flesh wounds that were a mixture of blood and green pus. It looked like a tiger had sunk its claws into me. Upon further examination I noticed that I had similar injuries to the back of one leg and my err, umm…unmentionables. I got in the shower in hopes that by rinsing the areas off, the pain would decrease. I collapsed in pain as soon as the water hit my skin. Confused at what could have caused this, but not willing to miss out on hanging out with friends that night, I dried off with my towel, and threw on some clothes. As the night progressed the pain intensified and by midnight I was in the emergency room. As it turns out 22 football players were treated in the emergency room that night. After investigations took place over the next several months it was determined that the injuries were actually chemical burns. Football fields are normally lined with calcium carbonate–on that day the field was accidentally lined with calcium hydroxide, aka caustic lye. To help visualize the process by which calcium hydroxide burns flesh, watch the movie Fight Club. There is a scene where Brad Pitt pours the chemical on Edward Norton’s hand and his flesh instantaneously begins to dissolve. Excerpt from the movie:
Tyler and Narrator are making soap from the fat of human bodies
Tyler: Yeah with enough soap one could blow up just about anything
Narrator Voice Over: Tyler was full of useful information
Tyler: Ancient peoples found that their clothes got cleaner when they washed them at a certain point in the river. Do you know why?
Narrator: No
Tyler motions to come over. Narrator leaves his job of stirring the fat to face Tyler across a table. Tyler begins to put on safety gloves, glasses
Tyler: Because human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river. Bodies burned, water seeped through the wooden ashes to create lye. This is lye
Holds up a bottle containing white flakey substance
Tyler: The crucial ingredient. Once it mixed with the melted fat of the bodies, a thick white soapy discharge crept into the river. Can I see your hand please?
Narrator gives him his hand. Tyler grasps onto it, licks his lips and kisses the back of Narrators hand
Narrator: What is this?
Tyler looks at him, sprinkles the lye on the narrators hand and says:
Tyler: This is a chemical burn.
Narrator screams in pain, staring at his hand as it begins to burn, reeling while Tyler grasps it tightly
Tyler: It will hurt more than you have ever been burned and you will have a scar
Narrator: What are you doing?!!! [screams]
Narrator Voice Over: Guided meditation worked for cancer it could work for this
Narrator closes his eyes, cut to scene of green forest in his mind. Cut back to Tyler.
Tyler: Stay with the pain, don’t shut this out
Narrator: No, no [screaming moving violently, trying to escape tyler’s grasp]
Tyler: stay with the pain, don’t shut this out. The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes, like the first monkey shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing
Narrator closes his eyes again, trying to shut the pain out, trying to be calm
Narrator Voice Over: I tried not to think of the words searing flesh.
Tyler: Stop it! This is your pain. This is your burning hand it’s right here
Narrator: I’m going to my cave, I’m going to my cave, I’m going to find my power animal [sobbing]
Tyler: No! Don’t deal with it the way those dead people do. Come On!
Narrator: I get the point okay please!
Tyler: No what you’re feeling is premature enlightenment
Narrator closes his eyes, cut to his mind’s eye in his cave. Cut back to Tyler. Tyler hits Narrator across his face
Tyler: this is the greatest moment of your life and you’re off somewhere missing it
Narrator: I am not! [sobbing and grunting in pain]
Tyler: Shut up. Our fathers were our models for god, if our fathers bailed what does that tell you about god?
Narrator: [grunts, eyes closed still fighting the pain]
Tyler hits narrator across the face again. Narrator still reeling, moves his hand, attempting to reach for sink, for water. Tyler holds fast.
Tyler: Listen to me. You can run water over your hand to make it worse, or, look at me. Their eyes meet. Or you can use vinegar to neutralize the burn
Narrator: Please let me have it!! Please!! [sobbing]
Tyler: First you have to give up. First you have to know, not fear, know that one day you are going to die.
Narrator: You don’t know how this feels!! [angrily, rage in his eyes looking at Tyler]
Tyler stares back at him and lifts up his right hand to reveal a massive scar on the back of it.
Tyler: Its only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.
Narrator: Okay [still painful look on his face but accepting]
Tyler slowly lets go of narrators hand finally where the flesh is melting, fizzling, smoking and burning. Narrator stares intently at his hand. Holding it out in front of himself on his own, feeling it. Not trying to run from it or trying to minimize the pain somehow. Tyler then reaches for a bottle of vinegar and dumps it on Narrators outreached hand. Narrator, with the final relief of the pain clenches his hand towards his chest and drops to the ground. Tyler looks down at him.
Tyler: Congratulations, you are one step closer to hitting bottom.
I don’t even remember how long it took to heal, but I still have the scars to remind me of that day. Anyway, that was a really long intro to tell you about what just happened to me at work. In the CT scan room we have an IV pole that sits on a round base with six wheels so that it can easily be moved. From the IV pole hangs a bag of saline and about three feet of extension tubing. The extension tubing has a hard plastic hub on one end and a sharp plastic spike on the on the other. As I was preparing to scan a patient, I attempted to move the IV pole. Thus began a series of unfortunate events. The pole got stuck, causing the extension tubing to swing up and poke me in my eye (the same eye that coincidentally has been red and inflamed for three days because of a corneal abrasion that I received from getting fit for hard contact lenses. Note: I need contact lenses because I am legally blind in that eye as a result of the chemical burns I mentioned earlier). In a knee-jerk response, I reached up and grabbed the tubing that had just assaulted me, and yanked at both the tubing and the IV pole. The tubing became dislodged from the bag of saline, simultaneously allowing the spiked end to jab me in the eye again while the entire contents of the bag spilled onto the floor. Now off-balance and standing on a tile floor covered with water, my legs fail me, and I fall violently to the tile, somehow twisting both of my knees (one of which was just recently surgically repaired). Next the IV pole falls on top of me with such force that four of the six plastic wheels shatter. The scene had to have looked like something from a movie. It reminded me of something from Final Destination, or something. Although if it were Final Destination, I would have had to have died. Oh I got it, the IV pole would have bumped a switch on the CT machine so that it started emitting radiation. I am unable to move because I am pinned under the IV pole which has lodged itself between the CT scanner and a cabinet, and I am radiated to death. Geez, I should have been a screenwriter…
Rammin' the Clam... 