Wounded

My brother and me in Rome, early 1975

Every kid, I suppose, has an "injury story" of some sort, the kind that puts little tendrils into one's life tale and contributes to one's identity. My husband tells one about the time he shot himself in the head with an arrow. (It's a good story.) One of my best friends spent weeks in a hospital as a two-year old, surviving burns from being scalded by hot water in a bathtub when her mom's attention had turned elsewhere at the wrong moment. Another best friend walks with a cane to this day because her hip is malformed, the outcome of an infection resulting from a childhood immunization administered in India with a dirty needle.

I have written about my "defining injury" here, but having a somewhat impulsive personality, I have collected some other memorable injuries, as well.

Torrential downpours are typical in the hot afternoons of the rainy season on my home island of Penang, Malaysia. The water has to go somewhere, and thus the city developed a system of drains, most of them open, along the sides of houses and streets. The drains by our house were little shallow ones that caught the runoff from the roofs and channeled it away to the larger drains. Every now and then I'd see a shrew scuttle down the open drain and dodge into a pipe leading to a downspout. (Nasty little guys, those shrews.) And every now and then one of the hospital gardeners would come along with a long-handled stiff brush, walking along and scrubbing the drains so that the black-and-green greepsch wouldn't build up into a thick slime.

People weren't safety-obsessed back in those days, so the drains remained open, easy to unplug and easy to clean. As we ran around playing we knew when to hop across the drain. If you tripped and fell by a drain near the house, you were just a klutz who wasn't looking where they were going. Pay attention next time, kid.

But down by the main road in front of the mission hospital there were deeper open drains. I remember them being about 2 feet deep or more, built that way so as to carry away all the accumulated water from our little shallow drains that emptied into them. Alongside the deeper drain was a paved pathway for pedestrians. We didn't happen to go down there very often, so while we were aware the drain was there, we weren't altogether familiar with the margins we needed to keep when walking along it. And the open drain was perhaps too wide to jump, so it didn't offer the same ease of the ones by our houses.

Being kids and liking to goof off, we were horsing around one day by the big drain when I was in 7th grade. We'd gotten big enough to hop across if we put some energy into the jump, and the risk made it fun for the lads to try. I tried it, too, but I'm not as good a jumper. On the way down--short of my goal--my shin caught the cement edge of the drain, leaving a big gash that dug down to my leg bone. I walked into the hospital crying, shin bleeding enthusiastically, and got cleaned up by one of the nurses. There was no talk of stitches, just a nice fat pad of sterile gauze over the wound and taped down.

I probably wouldn't remember my injury so well except that we were due to leave shortly to Europe and the United States for furlough. Had we stayed home in Malaysia I would have left the wound open to the air and it would have healed quickly. But it was winter in the northern climes, and I had to wear panty hose plus wool pants (where do you buy wool pants in Malaysia?) to stay warm enough as we dropped into Italy to get a look at the Vatican on our way "back" to the U.S.

Rome fascinated me. Since my dad was not along on this trip, my mom signed us up for guided tours. That's when I learned the value of a professional tour guide--so much history and culture to be learned. It was absolutely marvelous, and I soaked it up!

But there was my wounded leg to distract me in Rome. I didn't have fresh bandages along, so my hose continually scraped across my wound as we walked the cobblestones and marble floors of the old historic spots. One of my forever-etched memories of Rome, besides the Sistine chapel, the Parthenon, and the Coliseum, is that of undressing in the hotel room every night and trying to peel my hose out of the pus-encrusted scab on my leg.

There's probably some deeper metaphor in that, but I don't know what it would be. Maybe that when you leave a wound open rather than covering it up, it's going to heal a little better? Some of my readers have more expertise in these things than I.