Thoughts on my 76th Birthday

 

My mother wrote a Shutterfly Book about her life. This is how she described my birth.

Although I was small at birth, by the time I was in school, I was one of the biggest. That was me until my Junior year at high school.

I broke my right wrist where the hand and arm meet when I fell into the drain pipe. I was in a cast for three months. The cast was so soft by then that doctor cut the cast off with a pair of sewing scissors.

I fell off the backyard wall on Thanksgiving in 1959. I was playing hide and seek and didn't want to get be seen. When we went to San Diego's Military Hospital, they x-raid the wrong arm. When Senior Chief Pettey Officer Owen Downing, my dad, heard that mistake, let's just say I moved to the front of every line.

I was in Junior High when Barbara, my sister, pulled on the jump rope with a group of girls on our street. I would have exited without tripping, if Barbara hadn't pulled it straight. I fell against our car and broke one of my right incisor tooth. Because of the reflection from incandescent photographs off the silver cap on that tooth, I stopped smiling in photographs. When I forgot, the right side of my mouth was nothing more than a flash of light. The silver cap was replaced with a tooth-like cap for my High School Senior Pictures.

On the Saturday before my Freshman year's football practices began, several of my friends were playing Three Flies Up up in out back yard. I needed one catch to be the hitter. The batter hit the ball high, but it was headed for the block wall that edged our back yard. I was the only catcher brave (AKA DUMEST) to try. I dropped to my knees when I got close to the wall to stop my movement toward the wall. I didn't hit the wall. I did hit the sharp edge of a rock. This trip to San Diego's Military Hospital. One of the helpers was sent in to wash the wound and shave my hairy knee. "Oops," delivering in a shoft voice were the last sounds I heard before the helper left the room. The doctor came in and commented as he stitched the wound about the straightness of part of the cut on my knee. When they took the stitches out, a knob of skin that stuck out of the wound area. It took three years of my sliding into bases in high school baseball practices and games to grind enough of the extra skin off to that area to smooth it.

In closing, most of my life has not been as traumatic as described above. 

Hmmm. There was the day that my dad brought home leather football helmets when El Cajon Valley High School finally stopped making freshmen wear them. As I recall, my friends and I put them on and began throwing rocks at a hornet's nest. I REALLY DIDN'T THINK HORETS COULD GET INTO A HELMET. I found out they can, and they don't stop injecting venom util they're venom sac is empty. My face swelled up until you couldn't see my eyes. I wish Benadryl (diphenhydramine) had been OVC in 1959.

Next week I'll finish MOST of my injury stories.

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