Unlucky

People are amazing. The way we view the occurrences of our lives astounds me. I listened to a child explain away the fact that they had done none of the things they had been told to do for the past month. All the reasons were given with calm, patient rationality. None of the reasons were connected, but they were all perfectly reasonable excuses for not doing their homework... According to them anyway... When I asked if they realized that all of these problems were connected to poor choices and poor planning they looked me dead in the eye and said, sweet as pie, "I just have bad luck."

Two summers ago when I was working at boy scout camp as a field medic a 10 year old boy came in to see me with a rather interesting injury. He explained the entire situation to me, with the coda, "I just have bad luck." Let me explain the circumstances.

This child had a wrist cast on his right hand. He was right handed. In boy scouts in order to be able to buy and/or posses a knife the scout must pass a series of instruction called a toting chip. This young man started his week by lying to his scoutmaster so that he could falsify his toting chip. He immediately raced down to the trading post and using money he was supposed to use for his class supplies bought the biggest, sharpest knife they had. Then while in fishing merit badge class, instead of doing what he was supposed to be doing, fishing, he caught baby frogs and put them in a coke bottle (now empty of the coke his mom told him he wasn't supposed to drink). Then he screwed the cap on and holding the top of the bottle with his casted, dominant hand he began jabbing to the top of the bottle with his brand new knife using his left, non-dominant hand. Now recognize he was driving this knife into a bottle top not much bigger than a quarter and the knife it self at the widest cross section is wider than said cap. When he "unluckily" drove the knife through the webbing between his thumb and forefinger of his right hand (the only part not covered by his cast) he yanked it back out started screaming and tore off into my med-lodge waving his hand over his head, spraying blood everywhere and screaming. He was woozy from blood loss by the time I got him calmed down enough to quit racing around screaming, get a compress on his hand, examine the damage and then get him in a car to the ER (by the way, this means I literally had to chase him around my clinic with him spraying blood and screaming, until another person came to help me and just as we cornered him he started to faint and I caught him. He was lethargic for a few minutes which is when I examined him and got a compress on his hand. He either fainted from the blood issue or more likely the screaming.) After 8 stitches, he called his mom and demanded to go home because it was "no fun here."

Yeah, he was one "unlucky" kid.