CURING A CHILD BY BEING GROSSED OUT

Yesterday on the playground while I was on duty, several kids ran up to me with horrified looks on their faces; there was an injury, and someone was seriously hurt. My instinctual love and concern for a child in distress kicked into hyperdrive, and I followed the children in a furious race to a little girl, who was laying on the ground sobbing.

It's a new year, and I'm kind of, how shall we call it, a babe in the woods all over again. I'm beginning to think my wife, Peggy is right. She's claims that every day is a new day for me, and I've heard her many times refer to some turnip truck that I keep falling off of, which doesn't make sense, because not only do I not like turnips, I don't think I've ever been on a turnip truck.

The sobbing, little girl down on the ground had taken off her shoe and sock on her right foot and was squeezing it like one of them doctors on television in the emergency room holding onto a dying man's neck to keep the blood from squirting out like a sprinkler watering a city park lawn.

I got on the ground and as calmly as possible croaked, "What's the matter?!?! She said, "I'm bleeding!" I screamed out, "Where? Where are you bleeding?"

She reaches down to her feet and pulls the big toe and the toe next to it so far apart that my initial diagnosis was that her toe bones had almost been ripped apart. Then she points to a teeny-tiny, itty-bitty, minuscule minute drop of what might be considered blood if examined under a miscroscope by a highly trained blood recognizer person.

What mystifies me is the incredible angle of the two toes. Her big toe is at an angle of over 180 degrees from the toe next to it. I ask her, "Do your toes hurt?" She says, "No, Mr. R., it's the blood. Look!" Well I can't see any blood, thank heavens, because if I did, I'd probably pass out, and then everyone would know my secret. (I faint at the sight of blood.) Instead of seeing blood, I am staring at two toes that have been bent to a 200 degree angle from each other, and it's freakin' me out, man. I tell her to let go of her toes, which she does, and then I ask her to bend her toes back again. She bends them a little, but not like before. I have to see it again, so I tell her, "Turn 'em back real far again like you did before." She does it, and I gave an audible moan. "Awwww. Uhhhh. Oh that's gruesome!"

I realize the little girl isn't crying anymore. She said, "What's the matter, Mr. R.?" I told her that her toes are very flexible, and if I had bent my toes like that, they'd have broken like little twigs. That's when she let all hell break loose. She bent those two toes so far back, they almost touched each other at the nail. I shrieked, "No! No! Oh! Stop it! Oh that's awful!" She thought my reaction was funny and did it again.

I had to get up and leave. I don't want to pass out in front of a kid I'm trying to wrench from Death's Door.

I thank our Gracious Lord I am not a doctor, and that, in His Infinite Wisdom, He has seen to it that I am a teacher instead.

But I did inadvertently do some doctoring. I think I distracted that sobbing, little girl so much with my antics, she forgot she was hurt.