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What It Feels Like...

(page 4 of 17)

“Imagine a Knee Cap on Your Cheek.”

After about two weeks, the pain went away. I stopped taking the pain pills. I was pretty much good to go as long as I didn’t bump my wounds or bite my lip or something. My lip is still swollen today because there’s scar tissue in there. I have a piece of metal still in my finger. When I went home to visit my family, I pulled a rock out of the back of my head. I thought it was scar tissue, and I kept scratching it. Then I told my mom I thought it was a rock. She said, “Don’t worry about it. If it’s a rock, it’ll work its way out.” She didn’t believe me, and then finally one day I was scratching at it, and I pulled a rock out. It was probably about the size of a No. 2 pencil eraser.

I was cleaning my ears one day, and I kept snagging the cotton on something in my ear. I thought it was just like Iraqi sand that had been in there so long that it had formed like a crystal. And I thought, “Why does this thing keep getting stuck?” So finally one day I was trying to get it out. I took the cotton off of the Q-tip, and I was just scraping it, trying to dig it out. And it started bleeding. That’s not good. Eventually, whatever it was fell out. I grabbed it, and it was just a small piece of metal that was stuck in my ear.

I have a bone fragment up on my cheek. Imagine a knee cap on your cheek. I can move it around. I’m not even sure if it’s part of my cheek, or if it’s like a piece of clay from the flower pot. It’s not metal. I just know that it’s in there, and it moves around. I asked them to cut it out, but they said it’s so close to a nerve that it could be resting on it, and if they take it out, the corner of my eye could droop. It doesn’t hurt. It’s been in there so long that I don’t even realize it’s there. Every once in a while I’ll lie on a hard pillow, and it’ll kind of push up, and I can feel it.

I have a scar above that where like hot metal came through, and it like tattooed underneath my eye. So that’s never going away. But all the other scars healed really well, so I was happy. It was just the teeth and the lips and right under my eye. None of those things got infected at the time. They gave me enough antibiotics to kill anything. I was wearing goggles, and if I hadn’t been then it would have definitely hit me in the eye. I actually picked up my goggles afterward. They were ballistic glasses, and the only thing left was the frame. The yellow lenses were gone. I tried to put those in my pocket, but when I got to the first place where I was treated, they took everything out of my pockets. They took those away. And I heard they were on display somewhere on why it’s important to wear eye protection. That’s cool and all, but I kind of want my glasses back.

“Oh, I Forgot my Teeth.”

Last Tuesday I finally got all my surgeries to repair my missing teeth completed. It was a two-year process almost. It took a year for me to be healed up enough to start it, and then it took another year to just get the whole thing done. For about six months I just had my molars. I was still missing the front 10 teeth—the top four, bottom four and then two molars.

After that, I finally got a partial, which is like a small denture. They gave me that, and I wore that for about a year and a half. Not fun. I’m so glad I don’t have to wear the partial anymore. It’s just annoying to take your teeth out to brush them in the morning. Or when you go to sleep at night you take them out, and when you get up to go to work in the morning you’re like, “I got my wallet. I got my keys. Oh I forgot my teeth. Let me go back. Let me get those.” Now I’m done with that. It’s all permanent. They actually glued the teeth on these posts that are embedded inside. That was very painful as well. It took about three hours.

 “I Don’t Regret Anything.”

I do look different than I did before it happened. I still have times when I look in the mirror, and I get upset. But I don’t regret anything. Do I wish it didn’t happen? Yes. Do I wish I hadn’t joined the Army because of that? No. I don’t regret joining up. It was a good life experience. I learned a lot about myself. I’m actually kind of relieved that it happened to me and not to somebody else. I was a medic, and I was there to help people and protect people, and if someone else would have gotten hurt on my watch, I’d have felt really bad. Kind of like the guy with the thumb. If he was hurt, and I couldn’t do anything about it, I’d have felt useless. My whole point in being there was to help people get better.

The guy who I replaced on that mission, I actually saw him two weeks later when he got back from Iraq. They were having a ceremony for about 30 people, and he was one of the 30. As soon as they told him that they were released from formation to go see their families, he came straight to me, and he was thanking me. I was like, “Dude, you don’t have to thank me. I would do that for anybody.”