The first stitch I’ve ever gotten
I received the first stitch of my life about one month after my 31st birthday.
On Friday, 6th August 2010, Sri KDU organised a Merdeka Carnival in conjunction with Patriotic Run, which is the school’s mini-marathon. It is usually held in conjunction with National Day, but this year because the fasting month was starting on 11th August 2010, the school decided to have the run earlier.
My class was planning to make a maze of terror, and were only allowed to start our preparations on Thursday 4pm. I stayed back with the kids until 11.30pm to get as much done as possible, but the maze was still far from finished, and we had to come back early the next morning to continue work. The guards told us we could get in by 6am, but I was too tired and decided to get there by 7am. Bryan Homi asked me to pick him up from Zhou Han’s house, but because they overslept, I had to WAIT FOR THEM and we ended up reaching school close to 7.30am.
I was trying to fold the metal legs on the wooden table when the leg snapped at the ring finger on my right hand. I didn’t feel the pain at first; all I saw was BLOOD. My immediate reaction was, “Oh, we have real blood here.” Then I ran all the way to the school infirmary to ask the nurse to clean it up and to put on a dressing. The nurse took one look, and told me I needed stitches. I asked her, “What, now?” She must have thought that it was a really silly question. But what actually ran through my head was, “I need to be at the maze to monitor the students.” She didn’t clean up the wound, but put two tight layers of dressing to tide me until I get to the hospital.
I then ran back to the special classroom to get my handbag, but because I hadn’t had breakfast, I could feel the nausea building up. Jasmine Leong saw me, and stopped me to ask what was wrong – she said I had gone so pale!
She was going to accompany me to the hospital, but she couldn’t drive; so she got Mr Lee Wing Hong (the new Chem teacher) to drive me instead.
I went into the emergency ward and was given two shots: one painkiller in my ass, and another in my arm for tetanus. The nurse then opened the dressing but had a hard time taking it off because the school nurse had put the first layer on so tightly. She cleaned it and then put a basic dressing on it. They then recommended I get an X-ray done to ensure that there was no fracture.
After the X-rays, a hand specialist took a look and said that it didn’t require major surgery and said I only needed stitches. They were going to get an orthopaedist to take a look at it, but he was busy at that time so the emergency ward nurses suggested we go for breakfast instead and to come back in half an hour.
When we came back after breakfast, we were told that orthopaedist had come down in our absence, and they then sent us upstairs to see him. We had to wait for about half an hour before we were called in. The orthopaedist, Dr Soong, opened up the basic dressing and was going to do only another dressing before taking a second look and realising that I needed stitches.
He first administered a local anaesthetic, which was injected at the base of my ring finger. I couldn’t bear to watch that one… IT HURT!!!! I could feel the sensation of the anaesthetic traveling to my finger. But it quickly numbed my finger and the stitching process didn’t hurt at all. In fact, I was able to watch the entire stitching process without squirming or wincing at all. I was quite interested and fascinated because I had never received stitches before in my life!
Dr Soong was quite surprised and impressed that I could watch the whole stitching process. It was Mr Lee who was squirming with his shirt pulled up over the bottom half of his face.
We got back to the school late – at 11.30am. That’s 3 hours after the accident happened.in the hospital! The kids were already running the maze and there was already a line.
I’m going to be removing my stitches on Monday (hopefully) after 10 days. It was supposed to be removed tomorrow but I’ll be accompanying the kids to the debate competition at IIU.
I didn’t manage to take photos during the stitching, because I couldn’t have possibly managed it at that point in time; and poor Mr Lee was squirming too much. I did manage to take a photo of the stitched finger though… if you’re not squeamish, you can view them here.
Oh, and the class managed to make a little profit from the maze. The important thing was that we covered cost, which fortunately we did.