7th Grade Pirate

It was the Summer of 1995, and for me it was the Summer between 6th and 7th grade, a.k.a. Middle School. If I had the ability to use a font that had blood dripping from the letters, that's what I would've used for Middle School, but unfortunately the closest I can get is bold-italics with a blood red font, black background and the largest font size available.

I think we can all agree that Middle School is the worst time of our lives - a time when girls are getting boobs and guys are constantly squawking because their balls are dropping - and everyone is making fun of everyone else for it… it and everything else imaginable.

The beginning of 7th grade was not far away, so I was outside playing with my brother and making a movie and playing with the dog and in general enjoying the crap out of one of the last weekends of Summer. My dad was mowing the lawn, the sun was shining bright, my mom was making something wonderful for dinner. It was an all-around great day, rife with possibility.

That night, I woke up in the middle of the night screaming, my eye in more pain than I had ever felt in my life up to that point (and probably since). Imagine for a moment that your eye is being stabbed with a chainsaw - that is what I was experiencing. My parents, terrified by my blood-curdling screams of "TAKE IT OUT, TAKE MY EYE OUT!!! GET MY EYE OUT OF MY HEAD!!!!" rushed me to the emergency room.

Once the doctors reviewed the scans they were able to take in between my death-threats and profanity, it was discovered a tiny piece of metal sitting on my eye had begun to rust. "Metal??" you say? "Eye?!?" "RUST?!?!" Yes, all those things, combined and applied to my body. The theory that still stands to this day is: while I was playing outside and naively thinking nothing could go wrong in my life, my dad hit something with his mower that caused a tiny piece of metal to fly into my eye. It was so small that it didn't hurt and so I didn't feel anything until it started rusting. Thanks, Dad!

The solution: Drill it out. And by that I mean, use a drill-type device to fling the metal out of my eye, since apparently just pulling it off my eye was likely to cause more damage than a good old-fashioned "flinging." Who was I to argue how the task was accomplished? Drill? Yes. Flinging? Let's do it. Possible blindness and/or stabbing of my eye? As long as the pain stops. All I cared about was getting the rusting piece of metal out of my eye before I reached the point of tearing my eye out of its socket.

For the procedure, they wanted to put this spring-like device in my eye that would hold it open, but my eye was so sensitive that I refused. I instead decided the best course of action would be for me to hold my eyelids wide open through sheer will while a drill came hurtling toward my eyeball. And I did. I was in so much pain and so determined for it to stop that I kept my eye wide open and my head totally still while the doctor slowly came at my eye with the drill, and proceeded to fling the piece of metal bit by bit out of my eye.

After it was all said and done, I had got to wear an eyepatch over my eye for about a month. What an honor! Luckily this is right when school was starting so I had the pleasure of wearing it to Middle School. Who says looking like a pirate isn't cool in the 7th grade? Everyone. Everyone at my school.