My Face Hurts













It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anybody, or at least to anybody who read my last hockey entry, that I sustained a slap shot to the face during our hockey game last Wednesday night. Despite this accident, I still maintain that playing in a men's league without a mask is a fairly safe thing to do. Our team only had 8 skaters for the game, so my failure to dodge the puck can easily be explained by on-ice fatigue.

If not fatigue, I can at least blame my teamate, Mario...the guy who took a head-high slapshot from the blue line with players in front of the net. That kind of behavior would have made any of my former hockey coaches screech profanities at his simple-minded defensemen...and rightly so.

The puck hit me as I was skating into the crease to screen the goalie. I barely had a moment to torque my head away from the black blur as I saw it approaching. I remember hearing a deadened "thwack" sound as my mouth absorbed the blow. It sounded like Rocky hitting frozen slabs of meat.












The velocity turned my head towards the net and all of my senses went cloudy. I maintained my balance and tried to make sense out of my muted hearing, blurred vision, and the numbness affecting my entire face. I think the ref whistled the play dead as I aimlessly drifted toward our bench. I touched my face gingerly, trying to determine where I was hit and how hard, and saw blood sticking to my fingers. My entire face was numb. There was no way to tell how extensive the damage was. Someone said, "Holy shit! Are you OK?" as I skated by, but I wasn't really sure how to answer. I wasn't in pain, I felt OK. Both eyeballs seemed to be in place...just kind of numb.

I poked my fingers past my lips and ran them over my teeth. Remarkably, all of them were in place and unaffected. My spirits were momentarily raised until I appraoched my fellow team mates...who looked at me with panic and fear, apparently alarmed that I was still standing. I calmly asked for a towel. They had nothing, and neither did the league manager who was working the scoreboard, "I can get you a first aid kit in between periods," he offered cheerfully.

















My brain wasn't functioning at full capacity. I was confused. Without any sense of how serious my injury was, and no materials to fix it, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. Briefly, I considered taking off my jersey and using it to stop the bleeding. I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the plexiglass in front of the penalty boxes. Blood was streaming down my mouth and neck. "Fuck," I thought, "I'm going to have to clean this up off ice."

In our locker room I got some paper towels wet and started cleaning up the coagulated blood to see what I was working with. There was a deep gash right next to my lip. It cleaned up well and looked decent after applying a little pressure. There was a thin, clean line that seemed to close up. "Hey, no big deal," I said to myself in the mirror, "This just might heal itself." I smiled and watched as the gaping cut reopened deep into my cheek as my facial muscles altered my expression. Blood started pouring from the wound once again. Fuck, I'm going to need stitches.

I made my way to the lobby where I found a first aid kit, applied an alcohol pad, and fastened a couple of butterfly bandages to try to keep the cut closed. We fought back to tie the game at 4:4 in the 3rd, but our substitute goalie hit the wall and let a quick 3 of 4 easy shots pass him by. It was a frustrating way to end the evening.

As I left the locker room a team mate consoled me with a reminder, "You were never that attractive anyway."

"Fuck that," I thought, "I'm sexy as a motherfucker. But where the hell am I going to find a plastic surgeon to fix this beautiful face...at midnight...on a Wednesday"

I went home and took a shower, smoked a joint, thought better of having a beer, and decided to embrace a manly new scar by having it stitched up at a common hospital emergency room.

At Advocate-Good Shepherd, (1:00am) it took 2.5 hours to get stitches. The local anesthesia that the doctor was injecting me with didn't seem to do much of anything, so the bastard poked me about 50-60 times in the face while he manipulated and played with the flaps of my torn skin.

















Me: "Aahh!!"
Doctor: "Sorry, that spot shouldn't have been numb...I was just testing you."
Me: "Great."

When he had finished putting in the six stiches, I demanded a mirror. The doctor looked on and smiled at his terrifying work before sending in a hospital representative to sort out my insurance.

The stitches come out tomorrow, but I'm not reserving much hope. I've given up on being a beautiful creature of God. My appearance is of no matter any more...nothing really matters any more. My disfigured self will soon learn how it is that all of you ugly fuckers live out your tormented day-to-day lives.

::shudders::


six stitches












removed

My Finger Hurts

Update! Monstro went to the web site of the Ecuadoreans(Yes, I had no idea they had computers in Ecuador, either) and found a picture of the asshole who mangled my finger.


While in Rio, we happened to train one morning with a group of BJJ guys visiting from Ecuador. I was paired with a giant blue belt with an ugly face who stomped around at 220lbs. I don’t know who this guy was trying to impress, but he was super aggressive, and out of control. A few minutes into our spar, he plowed into me just as I was using my right hand to frame against his body. My right ring finger became separated from his brothers, and bent at an awkward, unnatural angle.

left: Dirty* Ecuadorean Asshole
I continued grappling, broke the posture of the big, dumb animal laying on top of me, and held him down with my left hand so I could inspect my right finger. It looked crooked. We continued to grapple when the same damned thing happened to the same damned finger. So now, almost two months later, my finger hurts.

I asked a RN at our office what I should do about it.

"Well. Even if it was broke, it's too late now to rebrake and fix it. It'll be fine after a while, but it will be crooked for the rest of your life."


Another door closed. I will never be a hand model with lovely shaped, and beautifully delecate hands:


In addition to my finger, my body was wracked with minor injuries and soreness upon returning, so I made an appointment with Noi, my massage therapist. Noi is a rotten sadist in her early 40s, a native of Thailand, who never fails to bring tears of pain to my eyes. After Noi heard that I train Jiu Jitsu, she began claiming victory at the end of my massages. “Who won?” She asks me after inducing pain on par with delivering a breech birth. “You did,” I reply.

“I always win.”

As she was finishing my massage, and yanking on my fingers individually, probing for weakness, I gave her a warning not to yank on my injured finger. She took a good look at it, squeezed it a few times, and then took a steaming hot towel out of her rice cooker. She proceeded to take the swollen knuckle and knead the shit out of it for several minutes. The pain, which originated from my finger, exploded in waves throughout my entire body. I didn’t have time to question her motives. After she finished, she blew on my finger like blowing out a match, a procedure I doubt has positive medical outcomes associated with it. As I was twisting in pain, I wondered how direct pressure could possibly help a sprain of this sort. As if reading my mind, she mumbled something about needing to "stretch the tendons."


Ordinarily, a couple days after a torture session with Noi, my physical pain disappears entirely. I first went to her after my lower back had been sore for months, and she healed me - it was like magic. My finger, however, remains swollen and painful.

And then last night, I had a dream that my finger was pulsing and glowing bright neon blue where I had injured it, and I could sense it had special properties. I showed my finger to someone at work who told me it was a curse, and that he had special powers as well, and wish he hadn’t. I left the room and walked into another room. The same person was there, but this time he explained to me how to use the power, and opened his eyelid right next to my finger, and energy flowed from his eye to my finger, which glowed bright blue, pulsing and throbbing.

*You might wonder how I knew he was a "Dirty" Ecuador. A Fillipino/Mexican-American, who is dating an Ecudorean, told me so. (And he's been to Ecuador)

Bitch Stole My Cake - Part II or Let Me Eat Cake

The Kardashian family has decided to taunt us by publishing their wedding cake pictures in OK magazine, a periodical I normally carry in high regard as a bastian of journalistic excellence.



So I made a moral appeal to Khloe:



Cake