Here is the essay I wrote and read to the class. I modeled the steps for writing a narrative.
Remembering a Split Lip
By Brad Bosler
All I saw was my friend Shannon
hurriedly walking past me with my son draped over her shoulder, his head lifted
up looking backward, her arms swaddling him.
Her eyes were wide, and she was taking charge, of what, I was not sure,
but I knew she was a nurse. I also knew
something was serious when I saw my wife’s face. She doesn’t handle injuries well. She panics and freezes, but she was walking
behind them telling my son that things would be all right.
When they
passed, that’s when I saw his face. His
top lip had been split. He cried, mouth
open, in long sobs of pain, afraid to let his top lip touch the bottom. It only took a glimpse at his injury to know
that this was serious. The confirmation
came when I stepped into the bathroom to take over, to hold my own child, treat
him, and comfort him.
The blood
from his lip flowed freely, the sink resembling a suicide scene, drops and
splashes on the counter and on his shirt.
We reached for anything we could, confiscating a towel from their
bathroom. We were at his older sister’s
softball workout in a building that was once a workshop of some kind. The wooden floors creaked as we tried to
rinse his face in the makeshift modern bathroom. I didn’t care about ownership of the towel at
a moment like that. All I cared about
was making the pain stop for my child.
The human
body is so fragile. Most days we live
our lives unaware that our skin is but a thin membrane stretched over fat and
muscles. We get scratches and nicks and
think nothing of it. But for my son and
us that day, we learned that a softball bat to the face, even the weak swing of
a small child, can tear open a gash that band-aids could not fix. Our four-year-old son needed an emergency
room. He was going to need stiches.
With the
stinging pain in his face and blood trickling down his shirt, we had to drive
thirty agonizing minutes from Rising Sun, Maryland, to the Christiana Hospital
in Delaware.
An
emergency room visit is marked by two things: waiting and gratitude. Around us were people who needed more help
than us, people with broken bones, some with poorly bandaged cuts, and babies
wailing in misery. No mater the injury, no matter how much pain you think your
child is in, you wait until it is your turn because there are people who are worse
off. The gratitude comes from knowing
that the injury is not that bad. The
gratitude also comes from knowing that you will eventually be helped.
We sat in
the emergency room with our son. All the
while he was continuing to keep his mouth open trying not to let the split
upper lip touch the lower lip. The three
of us listened to the painful sounds that surrounded us, for only a thin sheet
separated the patients. We heard the
voices of other parents, their children crying out in pain. We heard the intercom system asking for all
free doctors and nurses to report for a code blue; someone had stopped
breathing. And we thanked God our son
was only injured by a bat when we heard the call for the emergency room to
prepare for a trauma patient being flown in by helicopter.
In a way,
the emergency room is like a waiting room for death. Those of us who were there for small injuries
were give just a little glimpse of our own inevitable end. But we got to go home. For some that day, they would not be going
home; they were just passing through.
“I want to
go home,” my four-year-old son would repeatedly say. But we couldn’t. We kept telling him that we needed to wait
for the doctor, but that didn’t help. We
had been waiting for two hours and had many more to wait until his ordeal was
finished. My wife and I held each
other’s hand while we each held one of his.
We knew our daughter was safe with our friend Shannon, yet I wanted her
there. We are a family. You don’t think about what family means until
something traumatic happens to refocus your attention.
My son was
a difficult child since birth. He was
stubborn, and still is at twelve. But
every frustration I felt towards my son was buried beneath the love I felt for
him at that moment. Through all his
stubbornness and anger he expressed daily, I often forgot how much I truly
loved him. As he lay there on the
gurney, the plastic surgeon finally arriving after four hours, he looked so
delicate. They had sedated him so that
he felt no pain, but he was paralyzed and awake. I wondered what went through his young mind
as his lip was being sewn up. He looked
dead. The doctors warned me to not stand
and watch because I might pass out. I
didn’t. I just observed as I always do.
I forget
about that day in the hospital as I go through the routines of life. I focus too often on the things that really
don’t matter. I let life frustrate
me. But every once in a while, while the
family sits at dinner, I look over at my son who is usually doing something
funny or stupid now; he is loosing his stubborn, difficult edge… slowly. He will be smiling or giggling because he threw
something at his sister. I will notice
the scar on his lip. It didn’t heal
well. That’s ok. His scar reminds me of
a younger Jacob, one that frustrated me on a daily basis. But now I see him in the smile of the older
Jacob, the one that frustrates me only every other day. Every time I see him
smile, I try to remember what is really important in life.
