The day my lip fell off.

I again might have written about this before but I can't find it and since part of the reason I want to write this blog is so that I will remember these stories when I get old I will just write it again and maybe I will tell it a little different or come up with another moral to the story therefore I give you...The day my lip fell off, by Erika

I was twelve years old.  I know this because I had just gotten a brand new 10 speed bike for my birthday.  It was in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade years in school and I had decided to leave my parents neighborhood to go for a bike ride.  I felt so free, so mature, in retrospect SO STUPID!!! My parents still live in the house I grew up in, there is no where good to ride a bike anywhere around there but in my parents neighborhood.

I had gone down a short road to the first turn and turned left.  There was gravel in the turn and my wheels slid on it.  I lost control, went off the road , face planted into a tree, and landed in a creek that was pretty deep.  I looked around the muddy walls and noticed the very large amount of what I assumed to be snake holes.  I kept sliding down and finally had to claw my way out leaving my bike behind.

I walked up to a house that I had been going to all summer.  The woman of the house was having chemo treatments and my mother was taking her, therefore I was taking her.  I tell you this because she should know me, but when I rang the doorbell that day she did not know me only I didn't know why.  I knew I had hurt myself.  I thought there was something wrong with my teeth, and I'm sure I noticed blood but I thought for sure she would be able to know it was me.  She yelled for her husband to come see this little girl, and then I tried to talk.

My nabe ith ehwikuh and I said that over and over.  She just kept asking her husband what on earth they were going to do and patting my bloody face with dry paper towels.  As she was doing that she said look how beautiful her black hair is!  The only person I every knew with hair as black as that was Jim Pierson and I pointed to her.  She then screamed IT'S ERIKA!!!!

My parents were there pretty quickly thereafter.  My mother couldn't look at me.  She drove the car and my father sat in the back seat holding my head.  I remember my mother telling my father that we were out of gas and he just yelled at her to drive faster.  We got to Children's hospital and they immediately took me back.  Probably because they didn't want me scaring the other patients but again I didn't know that at this point.

Hours in to this ordeal I asked to go to the bathroom and finally got to look in a mirror. It was bad.  There are no pictures of it because my mother didn't want me to remember the trauma.  It's one of the reasons that I take so many pictures for my kids today.  I would love to go back and see what it looked like, how bad it was.

The surgeon lost track of how many stitches were in my face at 100.  They had to completely reattach my upper lip.  There was a gash next to my eye that had it been any closer I would have been blind, a large cut at my jaw line that they thought they were going to have to sew my jaw shut for but it miraculously was not as bad as they had first expected.  A cut at my neck that was uncomfortably close to my jugular.  It goes without saying that I am lucky to be alive.

The old man whose house I had walked to after the wreck had gone down and gotten my bike and he told my dad it was a total loss.  My father went to go pick it up, but was confused because it didn't look that bad.  The older gentleman had never seen bike handlebars that looked like rams horns before.  I spent the summer having dental work done, and going to doctors appointments.  It is most definitely a strong memory that only left behind a few barely noticeable scars.

It's funny how even the hardest most uncomfortable scars from life lessons eventually fade and are covered up by the millions of memories that come with living our life.  Do not allow the negative things that happen to you in your life define you.  Focus on the positive, the beautiful.

Go out...Be kind.