The Remaining Tingle

I was recently reminded of a scar on my left ring finger the other day when it was unintentionally bumped. This is because it tingles like your funny bone does, unfortunately though it is still not that funny.

The scar came to be during the summer of my transition into high school.

I had played baseball back in the day and was a pretty good out fielder and chose to try my skills at it once again. I was terrible at the game, but I was a pretty good runner. I was bewildered, and still am, of how much conditioning there is in baseball. You run ninety feet from base to base yet for conditioning you run miles on end.

I rode my bike to practice that day and after conditioning, we played a slow pitch game to get lots of practice base running and fielding. Coach had given us the option to steal whenever we decided to. I had stolen second base and was going to try for third on this next pitch. The pitch was tossed and I took off for that white square and the catcher threw it to the third baseman. I thought I had him and slid into the base and as Brenden (the third basemen) went to tag me, he stepped on my finger.

I couldn’t tell if I was out or not. My hand was throbbing and I looked at it to find blood all over the place. If you don’t know what a baseball cleats/spikes are like, they are thin, square pieces of metal on the bottom of the shoe lying on its side to “dig in” to the ground, or in this case my hand.

I was taken to Mercy Care North. There they gave me stitches, which was a painful process. The doctor had to give me three shots of Novocain and injected it into the wound, which was excruciating.

That was not the last very painful experience I had with these stitches. It was hard to sit out of soccer, which I was playing for my middle school. When the time came for my stitches to come out I was more than ready because I hated my inactiveness. At the doctors, lying down they began to cut off the stitches. Earlier they had told me this would not hurt. They were wrong, as they tugged on one of them, my whole arm started zinging. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was like she was hitting the funny bone inside my finger over and over again. I theorized that that one stitch that intensely hurt was under or through a nerve and when the nurse tugged on it then it went ballistic.

Moral of the stories, don’t get gashed and need stitches; ever. Trust me on this one.