Free Association (of thoughts, ideas, impulses)

Everyone's asleep. Today my youngest son will be four. His birthday photos, I'm sorry to have to realize, will be marred by his left eyelid showing dark blue bruising from the procaine injections needed for the doctor to sew up an inch-long cut across his left eyebrow. The tall, sweet physician, a woman, at Glendale Memorial Hospital made a gentle joke, 'That's why we have eyebrows, for protection of our eyes.' I tried to counter with a similar joke by saying, 'Intelligent Design!' but it fell flat 'cause, I suspect, we both think that expression sucks. She was a lovely, gracious lady and I pray her work turns out better than mine did.

You see, my son had done almost exactly the same thing to his right eyebrow many months ago, a cut I 'fixed' with surgical tape, Neosporan, and frequent changing of the strong tape attempting to keep the edges of the wound together for healing. There is a faint scar that'll probably fade away in time. In the nervousness of being at the hospital I almost blundered again with a jocular. 'Your repair better work better than mine did!' addressed to the physician 'Sewing Mistress,' but luckily I spared her. 

The physician and the male nurse, at different times, asked my son, "What happened?" to which he repeated what he'd told me, that his year-and-a-half-year older brother pushed him (while they were using their metal bunk bed as a piece of gym equipment.)  The first near eyebrow decapitation occurred when he jumped from another bed, missed the top bunk bed, and fell onto the metal railing of the bottom bed.

Glendale Memorial is a private hospital not a County Hospital. When we first checked in at the Emergency Room, and I was upset and befuddled and frightened for my son, I read the questioning I was subjected to - probably having, in part, to do with would they get paid - as overly defensive, so I blurted out in a loud voice that the day after tomorrow would be the fourth anniversary of his having been born in this very same exact hospital at very great expense! (Thanks to my insurance, not my bank account.)  Curiously, the twelve or so emergency room patients laughed, including one of whom, an elderly woman, I later learned, had stepped backwards to avoid an oncoming vehicle so strenuously she fell and seriously bruised her back, but luckily not her head.

When I was the same age as my youngest son a boy next door threw a rock at me hitting me in the head. I bled profusely, and the scar resulting caused my parents to part my hair on the other side. I've looked for the scar but it has vanished.

Old wounds often go away; what to do about the ones that persist is another matter, for another day.

Barry