Personal Narrative

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.