Joshua’s English Paper

Joshua had to write a narrative for his 7th grade english class. He chose to write it about the head injury he suffered last year when he ended up with staples in his head. I thought I’d share it with you guys.  I was reading over it and I’m really impressed with his writing.  Especially for a 12 year old, he illustrates and organizes his thoughs very well! Enjoy!

Long, Long ago in a place far, far away lived a little boy named Joshua Nathan Lee.  Everyone just called him Josh for short.  That’s me.  I was five feet tall and had curly, dark brown hair.  One day, I was playing ball in the house with a official sized white softball while I was supposed to be reading in my room.  When I threw it up, it knocked the dome light fixture on my ceiling down. 

The light fixture fell twenty feet until it landed on my head, and then I heard a big crash right before I passed out for what felt like more than four minutes!  I got up and I went straight to find my mom to tell her, but she had already ran into find out what the crash was. 

She was pretty upset until she noticed the huge gash on the top of my head that was gushing  a river of crimson from my curly black hair and cascading down my face and neck.  She immediately scooped me up like I weighed nothing and carried me into the bathroom and rinsed out the gaping wound to see the damage that was done.  She grabbed a large red beach towel and wrapped my head up in it and rushed out to the car.  Our silver Volvo made it to the emergency room in what seemed like no time at all – my mom could probably drive for NASCAR! 

When we got there, I saw my grandma.  I call her my Nana.  She is a nurse at the hospital and she works there in surgery.  We didn’t even have to wait a second because Mom and Nana know all the doctors and everybody who work there.  My nana took me straight back to a room and set me up on the bed.  The room was big and hollow.  The walls were a depressing shade of green that could have passed for vomit or that weird color they painted everything back in the sixties or seventies, like in “That 70’s Show”.  It smelled like Lysol and alcohol swabs. 

My nana left me there with my mom and Brother Steve, my preacher.  He was on his way in the hospital to visit someone when he saw my mom running into the emergency room with me and he was really worried about me too, so he came in the room and stayed with me for a while, too.  It didn’t take very long at all before my Nana was back with the doctor and both of my aunts who work there, too.  Everybody was there to check on me! 

The doctor cleared everybody out of the room so he could have room to examine the gash in my head.  Well, everybody except my mom and my nana because he knew they wouldn’t leave anyway.  When he finished checking me out, Doctor Singleton told me how deep it was and how long.  It was cut all the way to my skull, about three centimeters deep and almost three inches long!  I asked him if I was going to need any stitches and he said no.  I started to feel a wave of relief until he continued talking.  He said I was going to need staples! 

Imagine how I felt as the doctor walked over to a cabinet to take out the painfully sharp needle that he planned to fill with numbing medicine and inject into my head!  Not only did he just plan to do this, but he actually did it!  I was not very excited about that part.  It took seconds, no – milliseconds until it started to numb my entire head!  Then, he rushed over to the other cabinet and I listened as it creaked open.  He grabbed a huge, black, electric powered staple gun.  All I could hear was pow, pow, pow, pow, so many times into my thick, hard, head!

I couldn’t believe it when I started feeling something pulling and they told me that the staples weren’t in correctly and they had to take them out and start over.  If they didn’t, they may just fall out anyway.  Then, the doctor cut and shaved my hair off around the wound.  This was when he noticed how much more glass was in my bloody red, gushy head.  As he took his tweezers and carefully plucked out all the little pieces of glass from the hole in my head, he dropped them into a dish people would probably use to vomit in normally.  The pieces of glass kept dropping into the dish – ting, ting, ting was the sound they made.  Then finally he was finished.

Then the doctor sounded like he wasn’t comfortable with putting the staples in my head.  That scared me.  My head was shaking and so were my hands.  My mom was holding my hand and I could feel my palm sweating.  I think my nana didn’t think the nurse was doing a very good job holding my skin together while the doctor did the procedure, so she kicked her out and she did it herself.  You can tell by her face that she did not really want to do it, but she knew she had to.  As my poor old nana walked up, she was sweating, her heart was beating really fast, and she was really scared.  I could see it in her eyes.  She doesn’t like it when I get hurt.  That was when she grabbed the tools and I felt them grasp the skin on my head and pull it together. 

By this time, the numbing medicine was worn off.  I could feel everything.  I told the doctor and he offered to put more medicine shots into my head.  I told him “no, just do it fast”.  My mom couldn’t believe it, her eyes were so big.  So the doctor, with my nana’s help, banged all those staples into my head until the gaping hold was closed up like a venus fly trap munching on a poor old fly.  I sure hope they didn’t staple a poor old fly in there! 

I stood up and stumbled a little.  I guess I lost a lot of blood because I was pretty dizzy.  I had a huge bandage on my head.  It was like a cast like knight’s armor, guarding me like some one who would carry a huge sword.  It reflected that I was fine!

All I could think about was school and what people would think.  I worried about P.E. and if one of the staples would get knocked out of my head by a dodge ball plunging me in the face?   My mom told me to just settle down and not worry about those things.  She would talk to my teachers and make sure I could sit out and not have to play anything that could get me hurt worse. 

I asked when I could go back to school and the doctor said “not for a whole month” and I started jumping up and down with tears of joy!   Not only because I get to miss school, but also because my head was going to be okay.  Wouldn’t you know that the doctor was only teasing me though, because on the note, it said I could go back the next day!  I did stay home that day because I had a headache. 

The worst part about my head injury was that when I got home, my mom made me lay down in my cold, hard bed because it was already really late when we got home from the hospital.  I felt better fast when mom’s friend, Miss Mandi, brought in a dish of my favorite ice cream.  Mint chocolate chip.  Bright green ice cream with dark brown dots never made me smile so big!

Finally, it was time to go to sleep.  I lay awake and stare out my window as I see the full moon glaring straight down at me as if some guy with a million flash lights was pointing all of them at my eyes.  Then, I think about for a minute what my nana was thinking when she put me back together.  Was she scared? 

So one thing I know for sure after this experience is that when your mom tells you not to play ball in the house, listen to her!  It’s like my mom told me.  She said she isn’t trying to ruin my fun when she gives me rules, but she’s trying to keep me safe.  Listen to your mom or you might end up like me!

author: Joshua Lee, my pride and joy!

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