On Martin Luther King Jr day in
2014, I decided one day to go in the woods behind my house and build a tree
fort with a couple of my friends from my neighborhood. Little did I know that
this day changed the way I approach sharp objects. So we got to the woods and
we saw a possum and we killed it because 14 year old boys like doing that kind
of stuff and that was when we wanted to build that tree fort. We gathered all
the wood and we went back to my house and got all the rope to tie everything
together. My job on this operation was to gather and skin the wood to make it
really smooth. So I was sitting there with my best friend, Mason, and we were
both skinning bark off of the tree and all of a sudden felt a sharp pain in my
thumb and I looked down and a cut my thumb into two pieces.

I panicked. I freaked out. I
screamed because I was scared because I have never seen a gruesome image like
that before (except in movies and stuff). I was standing there in the woods on
this nice sunny Martin Luther King Jr. day with two thumbs on one hand not
knowing what to do. In reaction, my other friend, Davis, rushes over to my aid
and give me a towel he had in his backpack. So everyone was reacting in a calm
way carefully getting me to safety of my house. Mason calls his dad and he gets
there within minutes and we exit the woods and get into his truck and drive to
my house. Once inside my house, my dad notices all the blood on the towel and
runs over and applies pressure to my thumb in order to stop the bleeding. He
asks me, “what happened?” I try my best to explain but the entire time I was
crying and stuttering the entire time. He didn’t understand what I was saying,
so all of my friends told him what had happened and looked at me and simply
said,” Everything is going to be alright Tucker.” That one sentence calmed me
down because from there I knew I wasn’t dying that day.
My parent’s that night were at a
disagreement on whether or not to take me to the ER. After numerous phone calls
and personal opinions of the ER, they came to a mutual agreement that they were
going to wait and go to Kevin tomorrow (my uncle). Kevin, my uncle and an
orthopedic surgeon, vigorously surveyed my thumb to see if I need to go to
surgery. He decided that he needed to numb it to see if he could perform the
operation there in his office. After numbing it down, it couldn’t be down so I
was sent to Altas Hospital where Kevin performed surgery to stitch up my thumb.
Currently, many years later, the scar on my thumb stands like how it did when
my stitches first came off.

In the end, this story means a lot
to me because of the valve of friendship. None of them freaked out, everyone
was calm, they were leaders not followers because they knew they had to get me
to safety of my house so it could be healed. Also I learned that to cut away
from yourself when using a knife or you will cut yourself. The thing that
really pops in this story was the fact that bad of an injury happened within a
second.
