My Experience

While playing disc golf on vacation down South, I knelt down over a particularly difficult lie in the rough and somehow managed to give myself a cut on the knee. It hurt, but not that much, and then I looked down as I climbed out of the brush. 1.5 inch gash right on the kneecap, which luckily was not bleeding.

“Huh,” I thought, “that’s pretty deep.”

That’s when the blood started pumping out of my knee, coursing its way down my leg.

My fellow golfers looked a bit green and said something to the effect of “um, that looks pretty bad.”

“Nonsense!” I shouted. “’Tis but a scratch!” Even though I was beginning to realize otherwise.

As we played our way back to the cars (no sense letting good golf go to waste, right?), the blood began to pool in my shoe, and realized I might need some medical attention. I’ll spare you the details of the time I spent bleeding in the local grocery store, buying medical supplies, and skip forward an hour to the ER waiting room.

The wife was hanging out with me (“this is not the ‘alone time’ I envisioned for us on vacation,” she admonished) at the nurse’s station. The nurse cleaned out the wound (he got most of the crap out) and said “the doctor will be right with you.”

As anyone who’s ever sat in an ER knows, that is the biggest lie in the world, unless you have the plague, were carried in on several stretchers, or have a crowbar sticking out of your skull. Some three hours later, the Physician Assistant came in and said “let’s get you sewed up.” Up until that point, I thought they were going to use dissolving stitches or the medical grade superglue that they used on my son when he gashed his forehead. I was told that they reserve those for facial and/or deep wounds, and that this one was on a joint, so it needed the extra holding power.

He numbed my knee (“you’re going to feel a slight ‘pinch’ here” which is usually the 2nd biggest lie in the world), and set about with his needle and heavy-duty thread. Less than 4 minutes later, I was the proud owner of 4 spanking new stitches in the kneecap, along with the discharge instructions not to swim, bathe (shower was okay) or aggravate the wound (“no deep knee-bends”). He told me to keep Neosporin and a bandage on it to help healing, keep it covered from the sun if I was worried about scarring (“Have ya seen the other scars on that knee, Doc?”) and to follow up with my primary care physician, who would take the stitches out in 10-12 days.

I was pretty good about following the directions, although I played golf a time or two more and did get in the lake with a waterproof bandage (which was useless) several days later. Since I had no infection, I didn’t follow up with my G.P., and my wife took the stitches out 11 days later. One of them bled a little bit when she clipped it, but overall that didn’t hurt any more than the anesthesia shot.