I know. I’m not Rambo. Not even close. But I once dream of being like him. I was ten when the movie First Blood came out. Sylvester Stallone was the most awesome dude on the silver screen. My dad took us to see it and I was riveted to my seat.
Mind you, this was on Minot Air Force Base so tickets were ¢50, a small bag of popcorn was ¢25, and a small soda was ¢25, so taking us boys to the movie theater wasn’t the expensive ordeal it is now. What was an ordeal was how triggering this movie was for my dad. He had fought in Vietnam and still suffered PTSD, though it wasn’t called that back then.
During part of the movie, [spoiler alert], Rambo jumps off a cliff and breaks several branches as a tree breaks his fall. One of the branches ripped the flesh open on his arm. My dude pulled out his knife and twisted the compass off the butt of the handle to take out a sewing needle and fishing line. I. Was. Amazed. He stitched up his arm right there with no anesthetic and no help. I decided that’s what a man would do.
Perhaps part of what impressed this on my mind so much was my accident prone life experience up to this point (and well beyond).
I was so accident prone, my dad bought me a blue t-shirt that had white letters in the front: “ACCIDENT PRONE.” That was when I was about 6. I outgrew it and my dad had one airbrushed for me at the beach. Each of us kids got a shirt airbrushed with our name. Mine: Bryant / Accident Prone. When I outgrew that one, he had one screen printed for me. I think it’s time I had a new one made at 52.
So yes, my experience with stitches and physical injuries was pretty solid, and Rambo’s expert self-surgery left an impression. Not more than a few weeks after watching that movie with my dad and brothers, I was out playing with my friend, Steven. We had wandered back through the woods and into a construction site. It’s probably relevant to mention that this was not a site where they were building an office. This was on a Strategic Air Command Air Base in the heat of the Cold War in 1982. This construction site was the location of a Minuteman Missile silo. There were stacks of semi-cylindrical concrete slabs that would form the silo itself.
Steven and I found that we could jump from one to another and get them rocking back and forth. It was the ultimate jungle gym – even during a time when jungle gyms were genuinely dangerous. That was all well and good until I was down below one of the curved slabs when Steven was rocking one from above. I placed my hand in just the wrong spot as one rocked away, then rocked back and crushed part of my left hand. The webbing between my thumb and index finger was split about halfway into my palm.
If you’re accident prone, you probably just got that sensation in your gut when you read that, like “Oh man, that’s going to hurt a lot and you can’t hit rewind.” Injuries sort of frustrate me more than anything else. It usually means another trip to the Base ER, where the doctors knew me by name. I’d had a cast removed from my right arm just a couple months ago the before this.
But this one was different. I knew immediately that it was different. Not for how bad it was, but because Steve and I had been playing in a forbidden area, and confessing that would mean our dads would get in huge trouble. On an Air Force base, a kid doesn’t just get in trouble. His dad does too. And his commanding officer is often involved. And this was a flipping MISSILE SILO!
So yeah, I knew I could t just confess my sins and get the stitches I needed. Steven and I made a pact that we wouldn’t tell anyone. I rode my bike home with one hand wrapped in my sock. At least the irritation of one foot in a shoe with no sock distracted me a bit. When I got home my hand was swollen and the damage looked pretty gruesome. But I remembered what my new hero had done.
I went hunting through mom’s sewing box and found the needles. Then I want hunting through the fishing tackle box and found some ten pound test fishing line. I calculated that would suffice; a calculation that involved comparing it to the 60 pound test and deciding that would hurt more. I grabbed the hydrogen peroxide from the first aid kit and a bowl of ice from the fridge. I knew I wasn’t quite the man Rambo was, but I could do this.
After going through the whole bottle of disinfectant, I decided I could do this. I threaded the needle and then bend a piece of ice to the wound until it was fully melted. It was poor man’s anesthetic and it numbed the site enough for me to do one stitch. Thankfully, the injury was on my left hand, or I’d be in real trouble. I’d watched several doctors sew up my injuries in the past. My hands, arms, knee, even my face. It bothered me that I couldn’t watch them the times I had stitches on my head. My technique was simple – close the wound and try to include all of the layers of flesh on each side, then pull it closed and tie the knot with one hand and my gritted teeth.
By the time I had the first suture done, I was more than ready for another whole piece of anesthetic ice. I repeated the process over and over again. Six stitches on the inside of my hand, about 3/16 of an inch apart, then fixe stitches on the outside of my hand. Those last ones hurt more for some reason.
I managed to get it all done with only one extra trip to the kitchen for more ice, and I wasn’t caught during the whole experience. Then I wrapped up my hand in an ace wrap. I knew it was the wrong thing, but I figured I could explain that I had sprained my hand a lot easier than I was bounding on the missile silo curved slabs and broke my hand open.
I kept my hand in my pocket and proceeded about my day. I went to church the next day and no one noticed me keeping my hand pocketed. Then off to school the next day and still no one noticed. Then came Tuesday evening. I was walking from the garage, through the kitchen and heading up stairs to my room. Mom stopped me and asked what I was hiding in my pocket. She said she noticed I had been hiding something a while. I said “Nothing” and kept on my way. She caught up to me by my shoulder and told me to show her what I had in my hand.
I tried and tried to convince here that there was nothing to see.
For whatever reason, I had covered the ace wrap in a sock (a clean one this time). She made me pull my hand out of my pocket, so I explained that I had hurt my hand at the playground but it was fine. She pulled the sock off and was slightly concerned that I had an ace wrap on. She removed it and noticed how sensitive I was to every layer coming off. It hurt. A lot. The benefit of the ice was long gone. The last layer of wrap came off and she saw eleven oddly colored sutures with amateur knots. She freaked! What had happened? Before I could answer, she grabbed her purse and was dragging me to the station wagon for another trip to the ER.
I kept telling her it’s fine and there’s no need to go to the doctor. I was terrified they would ask me what happened and then that they would redo the sutures. It was only about a mile away, by my memory, from our house on Raintree Circle to the ER. We entered and she told me to sit while she filled out the admission form. A nurse took me back and studied the hand before sending the doctor in. He was a young-ish doctor but I had seen him several times before.
He poked and prodded and sent me for an X-ray, then came back and told me the good news: First off, young man, you don’t have any broken bones. Second, that was a pretty good job you did with those sutures. I honestly don’t remember if he asked how it happened, but I’m sure I didn’t tell the truth. Didn’t need Dad dealing with that. I had gotten him in trouble with his commanding officer more than once before. And recently. The worst one was finding out the girl I kissed in the bus line (without her permission) was my dad’s CO’s daughter. That went well.
My mom’s response to the doctor telling me I did a good job in the stitches was to reprimand him. “Don’t encourage him! He’ll think he can do his own surgeries!”
The doc winked at me and told me to come back in a few weeks and he would remove the sutures. He said he would cut them one at a time and pull them out once the wound was healed all the way through but before the skin would grow over the sutures, giving me the correct instructions that he knew I would follow well before I’d let mom bring me back in for another visit. It wasn’t long after this that my dad bought me my own “Rambo knife”. Now I could do it all without breaking into the tackle box, first aid kit, and the sewing kit.