Stitches Out in a Subaru
Pain shot through my chin as my five-year-old body squirmed in the laid back passenger seat of a green highlander. My aunt was removing seven swollen, infected stitches from my chin in the middle of Yellowstone National Park with no numbing medication or even gloves. Applesauce and granola were crested to the corners of my pursed lips and my sticky hands gripped the sides of the seat. After each stitch was removed, I was allotted two minutes to sit up and eat a Welch's gummy before I had to lay back down underneath janky tweezers from the First Aid Kit in the glove box. After the very last stitch was removed, my aunt smudged a small dollop of neosporin on my fresh scar and released me to join my cousins playing chase in the woods.
If you’re wondering how I got myself into this situation, it all started on an ordinary summer night in July. I’d had a bad dream and slept in between my parents in their queen sized bed, which proved to be much too small for the three of us. Through the night, I somehow traded places with my mom, and ended up on the edge of the bed. Waking up to a loud slam against the hardwood floor followed by hot pain spreading throughout the lower half of my face, tears began streaming out of my eyes. I crawled back into the bed desperately grasping through the dark for my mom or dad, stumbling over their limbs. My bony knees landed in all the places they shouldn’t before my mom took me into her arms. She rocked me back and forth assuming the reason for my tears was the cause of another bad dream.
“Why are you all wet, Bel?” my mom asked me.
She carried me into the bathroom and set me on the sink counter before flipping on the lights. Her eyes widened in disbelief as red pigment flooded over both of us and continued to spew out of the ripped apart skin on my chin. I strained my neck to look at my reflection in the mirror which made me begin to cry harder. Beads of blood trickled down my little belly and rolled to the folds of my legs.
I received seven stitches in my chin the following morning which had turned out to be a surprisingly painless process thanks to modern medicine and the use of numbing cream. But what was unfortunate about this situation besides my actual injury was the fact that we were scheduled to embark on a three week national park camping trip planned with my cousins the day following my small mishap. The pediatrician ordered me to be careful with my stitches, not to leave them exposed, not to play rough, and to keep them clean. All things that my five-year-old self had no intention of doing. Counting on my parents to hold me accountable for these easy yet forgettable tasks, I chose to be rambunctious and keep my stitches at the bottom of my interest list. I would often run off in excitement, tripping through the woods of the national parks and falling on my chin repeatedly. Or I would take my bandaid off because my stitches felt itchy and proceed to scratch around them lightly with my grimy fingernails.
It didn’t take long for the stitches to get infected, considering the speed I was choosing to live my youthful life and the responsibilities I was knowingly kicking down in my purple Keen sandals. And since we were in Yellowstone, we were too far from a doctors office to get my stitches removed professionally, so we went with the next best thing. My aunt Jodi, an ICU nurse of 20 years at the time, would take them out instead.
Usually when stitches are removed, it shouldn’t hurt. Sure, some discomfort was normal due to the tugging of the stitch being carefulling threaded out of your skin. But since mine were infected and long overdue to be taken out, the whole process hurt like a bitch. Bitch wasn’t a word I knew at the time, but if I did, I know I would’ve been using it. However, the ordeal was over just as quickly as it started, afterwards it felt like it never really happened.
The whole scenario felt like a bit of a fever dream to me at the time and even when I look back on it, I don’t remember much of the nerves or fear I had climbing into the Subaru ready to succumb to my aunt's skill and my mother’s soothing words beside me. No matter how unideal, I have never looked back on this situation with anguish or unsettledness as I sometimes do others. Instead, I often find myself stepping into this memory and feeling like a badass for withstanding the lousy circumstances I had to face, although they were entirely a purebred product of my own careless actions.