Matt Davis

Journalism Bednar

Tues. 230pm

Just Another Day

I stand shocked and dazed; my ears have a dull ring that blocks everything out. The bright light of my 1987 Jeep Cherokee's headlights blinds me from the dark wilderness around me. Leaning into the brutal light, I see my fingers trembling and stained black from gunpowder. The ring finger on my right hand has a thick laceration across the fatty pad at the tip of the fingerprint. The end of my index finger looks like a radish that has been carved as some elegant garnish. The swollen red mass is completely foreign with unnatural grooves of flesh that are not supposed to be seen by the eye. The distorted digit oozed a thick mixture of scarlet blood and ivory white chips of bone. It's ruined. My button pusher, my pointer, my silent summoner, the thing you use to pick the spinach from your front teeth- yes my finger was all these things, but it was more- it was an integral part of my baseball game which was shaping my future more then than it ever would again.

* * *

The last month of school finally came and the semester had been a great success. As a senior I anxiously think about my next year in college. With the stellar performance in our district season, I plan on going to a good school and moreover a good baseball program. I am the senior leader of the squad, I bat in the heart of the line up, and I am on the verge of setting an RBI record. The regular season has come to a close with me as the district's MVP and our team is ranked 7th in state. It is time for playoffs and no one

is more excited than me. Because of our status we get a bye in the first round so my weekend is free. I go to my best friend's ranch with a few other buddies whom also play ball. After spending hours watching ESPN and joking about everything under the sun, it is time to enjoy the twenty-two square miles of the ranch. Enjoying the ranch means toting around firearms and looking for hogs, rabbits, raccoons, and other varmints to exterminate (this is no Rambo expedition but it is not too far from). My companion on this particular adventure was a good friend and fellow teammate, Clint. Due to his lack of experience with guns Clint is armed with a beginner rifle, the small caliber .22. After running him through a brief safety lesson we are off. Roaming around an enormous ranch at night can leave you a little disoriented unless you know your way around. After navigating the two of us to a spot I know will prove lively, I quickly spot a rabbit, take aim, and fire. Excited by the moment Clint wants to fire a round into the rabbit. As he steps from the Jeep, the loading rod on the gun slid to the ground. He asks for help and I assist, simultaneously I realize the safety lesson was too brief. Despite all hunting etiquette, Clint managed to put a shell in the chamber, cock the hammer, and put his finger on the trigger. When I went to help him with his equipment, I carelessly assumed that Clint would not have done any of the previous actions. Again, the lesson was too brief.

Feeding off the endorphins pumping through my body I feel little pain. I place the firearms in the back of my Jeep after removing all the shells in some sort of ironic action that says `it ain't gonna happen again, by God'. I inform the obviously emotional Clint that he is going to have to drive. He jumped in and sped off . . . in the wrong direction. After a U-turn and some specific instructions we made it back to a phone.

* * *

Climbing into the Llano Hospital Ambulance I am doing anything to keep from thinking about heavily gauzed mitt-of-a-hand I carry. Stephanie is the portly ambulance tech that sits across from me trying to do the same thing. I ask her about nearly every contraption and hanging tube that dangles from the truck's interior. When I feel like I have completed a worksheet for the ambulance's inventory, a silence fell which lead to a mental image of my destroyed fingers. How bad is it? Will I play again? No! Stop! It's fine.

≥Do you want to call your parents?≤ Stephanie breaks my mental struggle with another bombshell that hadn't even occurred to me.

≥Ah, shit. I guess I should.≤ I answered thinking of how to break this one to the ol' parental units. Stephanie pulls a clunky tan phone off the wall and dials the number I give her.

≥Ya want me to break it to `em?≤ she pauses for only a moment to see the

trepidation on my face, ≥Yeah, I better talk to them first.≤

I knew that I should have told them myself when Stephanie starts the conversation by stating her name and that she was an ambulance tech taking their son to the Emergency Room with a gunshot wound. I could imagine what my father's face must have looked like and what he said when Stephanie continued, ≥No, no, no he is fine. It's a small wound to the hand, nothing serious.≤ The phone was turned over to me and I told him I was okay. He said he was on his way and he'd see me soon. I returned the phone and fell back into my negative thoughts.

Upon arrival at the hospital some fifty minutes later, the pain was beginning

to start. It was a dull ache that steadily grew over the next two hours until my father arrived to take me to Austin. I received some medicine to help with the pain as we left.

The drive back to Austin allowed time for the severity to set in and I was hurt. The idea of losing my scholarship and not being able to play again twisted my insides, I felt awful. Tears began to roll down my face.

* * *

It must have been hours; I look at the clock, 7:30am. It had been six hours since the accident and my father was waking me up from my bed. It was time to go to the hospital. My dad has been in health care his entire career and happened to have worked with one of the foremost hand surgeons in the state. ≥He's a magician,≤ my dad's words sent to comfort me.

It is nearly nine in the morning and I am rolling to surgery on a bed with a thick intravenous plug in my forearm. All the nurses are being so nice to me and chit chatting with my father. A nurse comes to the side of my bed and informs me that she will be putting three separate drugs into my IV. She got half way through explaining the second anesthesia promoter when the drugs began to take hold. Exhausted and drugged I began to slip away.

* * *

I feel my shoulder aching so I open my eyes. I must be in recovery, as I look at all the beds around me. My arm is in a huge piece of foam cheese and the back of it is lifting my shoulder off the bed so my arm has fallen asleep, that explains the pain.

A nurse comes over to me and asks how I feel, ≥Are you in pain? Can I get you anything?≤

I tell her I would like some water and that my shoulder is uncomfortable. After she brings the water she starts to mess with the dripping plastic sack of fluid I notice is draining into my arm.

≥That should help,≤ she says with a smile, ≥you should try and get some sleep.≤

I can feel myself fading again. I close my eyes and fall asleep.

* * *

I wake up to the door opening. I find myself in a single room now and as I look out of the large floor to ceiling window I can see that I am well above ground. Its nighttime and my mother sits looking at the television until I mumble `hi'. Happy to see I am well she tells me the surgery went well and that I will probably feel a little funny because of all the morphine in my body. I am glad to hear about the surgery and I feel like I am floating about five inches above my bed.

I spent the rest of that night fading in and out of consciousness hoping to wake up just once in my bed knowing that it was all a bad dream. No such luck.

* * *

The next day is a school day and throughout the evening I receive visitors. Most of the faces and what is said blurs together because by this point I am taking full advantage of modern medicine. The nurse gave me a little clicker that allows a dose of morphine to flow into my IV drip when the pain increases. As far as I was concerned the pain lasted all day and so did the meds. While people piled in to hear what happened or how I felt, I clicked away and tried to laugh. I did anything I could to keep from accepting the truth of what had happened. I knew that I would not be able to play baseball again. I knew that my hand would never be the same. I knew about the worst, but nothing prepared me for the truth.

* * *

It is noon the next day, time to leave. I am wearing my clothes and I am out of bed. The only thing left is the follow up visit with my doctor and the physical therapist. I feel the knots churning in my stomach as I walk down the hall to the Physical Therapy Department.

I walk in and there waiting is Dr. Walters, my surgeon, with his left hand extended and a smile. I shake his hand and sit.

He cheerfully says, ≥Let's take a look, shall we?≤

I told him no. Feeling my uneasiness he smiles again and assures it will be fine. He then takes a pair of stainless steel surgical scissors and begins to cut through the thick gauze. As he comes closer and closer to my hand with every layer, I can see dried blood and puss causing the gauze to catch and pull. Finally it comes off. The truth: twenty-seven stitches tie around a pale, swollen mass of skin which wraps around a three inch steel pin down the middle of my index finger. Damn.

* * *

Ah, two o'clock, classes are finally done for the day. I sack up my books and head for the Robinson Center to catch a workout. I walk into the locker room and see all my friends standing, sitting, laughing. It's the team and we have practice in fifteen minutes.

≥Freshmen, you're late if you are still in here,≤ someone shouts from across the room, ≥get on the field!≤

Bats are clanking around while the guys are throwing their equipment bags over their shoulders. We all march down to the field. I am starting my third season at Southwestern University and the air has never been sweeter nor the grass so green. We are coming off a conference title and in a few months I get a big shiny ring to go on my now scared finger that says åChampionsπ. I throw my stuff down and dig out my glove. It's not just another day because I get to go play.

Authorπs Note

This was the first paper written for this class. Throughout the semester I have grown in my writing abilities and my articles have been challenging to write. For me, writing this first article about myself was much easier than the other two. The experience that is written above was a turning point in my life and writing about it was a very theraputic undertaking. When given the chance to write an article about yourself some people respond well and others feel more comfortable writing the stories of other people. In either case, writing intimate journalism helps you to utilize your ideas in writing in a different way. It was my experience in this class that will help shape aspects of my writing forever.

This class has given me the chance to explore the creativity in writing. I have learned how to interview (only after screwing up) and to take the words and emotions of one person and put it into a medium that others can experience. Learning how to show and not tell stories was one of the biggest problems my writing faced. Still, learning how to show opened a door that allowed me to be more creative with my writing.

Reading other examples of intimate journalism helped greatly in the process that my writing went through. With both, the texts and the website set up by professor Bednar, there are great examples of how to write an intimate article and also where you can get good ideas for framing your article. This was a fun class and it taught me a lot about my writing and myself.