Fear of Lawn Chairs

July of 1996, my very frantic, very worried mother is racing me to Urgent Care. Twenty minutes prior, I had been harmlessly leaning back and forth in a lawn chair in my neighbors backyard. I leaned forward and felt a sharp pain in my finger. Thinking nothing of it, I rocked back once more, this time to an unbearable, burning pain quickly spreading throughout my left hand. I looked down to see blood rapidly pouring out of a dime-sized hole in the middle finger of my left hand. Being just 6 years old, the sight of blood, especially my own blood, is enough to cause tears in and of itself. Compound that visual trauma is the very real, very excruciating pain, and I'm sure what comes next will surprise no one. I screamed.
I screamed louder than I thought capable. Rushing to the safe-haven that is my mother's side, I did all I could do not to look at the wound any further. Unfortunateyl, yet understandably, my mother's reaction was less than helpful. I am quite adament that the entire neighborhood heard the words she spoke, rather, screamed, "Oh my God! My baby! My poor baby, are you ok? What on Earth happened!!?!?" Her very uncomforting response caused me to glance one more at the bloody finger, to which I almost fainted.
The next several minutes became an absolute blur. I recal being dragged, by my good arm, into the house, staying there, briefly, while my mother retrieved a bucket to contain the blood rapidly exiting my finger, and then being pulled back outside to the car. As I sit in the passenger seat of my mother's Chevy Astro-Van, wondering if the doctor's office is really an eternity away, or if it just seems like it, I drift slowly into hysteria. According to my mother's recollection of the story, I began shouting nonsensical nothings, at one point claiming, "There's meat coming out! There's meat coming out!" Of course there was no "meat" coming out of my finger. What I had seen was the blood beginning to clot.
When I arrived in urgent care, my finger was instantly bandaged. No stitches would be necessary. As the doctors worked desperately to calm me, as well as my mother, the bleeding began to cease. I would suffer no permanent damage to my finger. Although for the next two weeks, I was required to soak my hand in this awful smelling solution, which would securely close up the wound and partially remove the scar. Although I survived this extremely traumatic incident nearly unscathed, with nothing but a small loop-shaped scar on my left middle finger, my new-found fear of lawn chairs would prove to haunt my existence for years to come.