The Many Adventures Of El Donaldo And His BB Gun

It has been a while since I have written about some of the happenings of my youth.  I have told you about the different jobs that I have held, about the fun and frivolity that was had cruising Clearwater, and I rehashed for the 100^th time the story about how I destroyed my shins in a motorcycle wreck.  In fact, accidents were a big part of my youth.  From the ages of 5-17 I was always in the ER for something or another that either had happened to me, or I had done myself.  Concussions, broken bones, and stitches, you name it, and I most likely have had it.  There is one accident though that sticks out above the rest in my mind.  Probably because it was 1000 percent (no, I didn’t mean to write 100, I wrote 1000 on purpose) preventable. It is perhaps the dumbest thing that I have ever done. Well, at least in the top 3.  And it involved the best Christmas present that I received in my youth.  My BB Gun.

 

I had wanted a BB gun for awhile, and was overjoyed when I opened one up on Christmas day, 1991.  Actually it wasn’t just a BB gun, it was an air rifle.  BB Guns have a spring that shoots the BB out.  With an air rifle you can pump it up and shoot a BB even further.  But for the story, I will call it a BB Gun.

 

The gun came with some paper targets to shoot at, which I set up on the side of our house to shoot.  You see, in between our house and the neighbor’s house was a fence that was perfect for shooting at.  To this day, there are still BB’s imbedded into the fence there.  After I had spent the paper targets, I took a sharpie pen and drew a target on the fence to aim at.

 

This satisfied my urge to shoot at things for the time being.  After a while, I grew bored with shooting at a fence.  So I started to experiment with my aim at other objects.  One of my favorite things to shoot at were the playground toys at the park across the street from my house.  I would only do this at night through my bedroom window so as not to hit any children that might be playing.  Yup, shoot things at night. In the mind of a 14 year old boy, that is the idea of safe shooting.  This act of stupidity gives you the idea of why I wanted all girls, and no boys to deal with.  I also would take aim at any cat that would enter our property.  We had a lot of stray cats in our neighborhood, and they were always trying to bother our cats and eat their food.

 

Another hobby of mine and the other boys in the neighborhood was to play Q-Tip Tag.  What is Q-Tip tag you may ask?  Well, instead of shooting BB’s, we would shoot Q-Tips.  Much like regular tag, someone is “it” and the person who is “it” must shoot someone with a Q-Tip for them to become “it”.  Being concerned about safety, we did have rules.  Rules such as no shooting above the belt, and only being allowed to pump your gun 2 times so when you did hit someone, it didn’t hurt as bad.  When I look back, I can’t believe that no one was ever seriously hurt.  Well, that is until someone was.  Off course it had to be yours truly who was the first casualty.

 

It was August of 1992, and I was preparing to enter high school.  I was pretty stoked, because like a lot of kids, my middle school career was nothing to write home about.  A new start was going to be great.  I had just turned 15, and the Benton County Fair was right around the corner.

 

It was about 7 in the evening, and my friends Adrian, George, and his brother Robert were down the street at George’s house.  We all had our BB guns, and were setting up soda cans to shoot at.  By this point in time, from using my gun over and over again, and oiling it up, the barrel had built up a greasy coating on the inside of it.  I had found that by just shooting the gun (unloaded of course) into the palm of my hand, it would leave a black mark from the oil in the barrel.  Shooting cans has lost its charm, so I started to show my friends the little trick that I could do with my BB gun.

 

Now in my defense, I had emptied all of the BB’s out of the gun, and had given the gun a good shake to see if there were any left in it.  When it sounded as if all the BB’s had been emptied out, I proceeded on with my trick.  The first time I showed my friends how to do it, everything was fine.  I had pumped it up three times, and the little black mark showed up just like I said it would.  Adrian however did not see me do the trick, and wanted me to do it again.  At this point, I had no reason at all to think that there was a lone BB that had been stuck in the oily residue in the gun.  So I had no qualms about doing this mighty fine trick again.

 

I pumped the gun.  I cocked the gun.  I proceeded to place the barrel of the gun right up against the palm of my right hand between the middle finger and my ring finger.  And before I knew it, my hand was covered in a strange red substance.  The two fingers that I mentioned were not in their normal places.  They were both bent forward, as if the muscles that were holding them in place had left for the day.

 

I sat there for about 5 seconds just staring at my hand, not believing what had just happened.  It wasn’t until the scream of my friends started to ring in my ears that I freaked out, and started to run down the street back home to get help.

 

When I arrived back at 419 E 8^th Place, the front door of the house was locked.  I ran to the side of the house where the gate went to the backyard.  As my luck would have it, it was locked too!  I had to climb over the gate one handed. Once I was in the backyard, I ran to the sliding glass door, and knowing better than to walk in the house and drip my O negative all over the carpet, yelled into the house to anyone who might be listening. “Mom!!!!  I just shot myself in the hand with my BB GUN!!!!”  Before my dear mother even started down the stairs, I heard her voice bellow back to me, “DON’T YOU DARE COME INSIDE AND GET YOUR BLOOD ON MY CARPET!!!!”  Seconds later my Dad came downstairs, threw me a small towel to wrap around my bloody hand, and told me to go get in the car so we could go to the ER.

 

Once at Kennewick General, the place where I was born, the place where I had come to before when I needed medical attention, I had to sit down and wait.  When it was my turn, they brought me into a room where they had all of their little tools at the ready to dig the BB out.  When you looked at my hand, it appeared as if the BB was right below the surface of where it went in.  They decided that they would take an x-ray before they started digging into my hand with a pair of tweezers just to make sure.  It was a good thing that they took this precaution, because the x-ray showed that the BB was not right below the surface.  Like I had stated earlier, it entered my right hand between the middle and ring finger.  But the x-ray showed that it was now between my index and middle finger.  Way to far up for them to dig out.  So they scheduled me for surgery in a few days to remove the BB.

 

During the x-ray, I asked the lady why my two fingers were tilting forward, and she explained that I most likely hit a nerve, and that they should go back when the nerve was better.  They did go back, but for the next year or two afterwards, any time I would be playing sports and catch a ball, my hand would go a little numb for a few minutes.

 

The thought of surgery was pretty scary for me.  I would have to get an IV, and would be under for the surgery.  The worst part of the whole thing was getting the IV started.  I sat there and watched the nurse stick what I thought was a 5 inch long needle into my hand, not knowing that only the tip of the tube had a small needle in it.  The pain was horrible, and I asked if I could just keep the BB in my hand as a souvenir instead.  When the nurse finally got the IV in, she realized that she missed my blood vessel.  So the whole process had to be done again.  This time however I looked the other way, and it wasn’t as bad.

 

Now ready for surgery, they wheeled me into the O.R.  I remember the nurse telling me they were going to administer the anesthetic, and that I should count to 5.  Before I knew it, I was out.  And as soon as I was out, I was awake again, back in the room that I started in.  A woman came in (who happened to by my friend Kimber’s mother) and asked me how I was feeling, and how high I had counted.  When I told her that I had counted to 4, she seemed impressed that I made it to 4.  “No, I started at 5,” I replied back to her.  Sitting next to my bed was a small plastic vial that contained the BB they had pulled out of my hand.  I stared at it, and couldn’t believe that a small sphere of copper had caused this much trouble.

 

The school year started, and the first day of school I still had the 5 staples in my hand.  My hand made a great conversation piece, and I enjoyed all of the attention that it received.  After school that day we went into the Dr’s office to have the staples removed.  After he pulled them out, I took them home and added them to the jar with the BB.  I don’t know whatever happened to that little jar.  I have a feeling that my Dad has it stashed away somewhere, and one of these days when we go over for Sunday dinner, he will present it to me.

 

In case you are wondering, I still used my BB gun after that.  I didn’t try my trick ever again, but there were many times that the self inflicted BB gun wound story would be brought up in the old neighborhood.  Usually right after someone had done something stupid.  I know look back on it and smile.  Sure it hurt at the time, but it makes for a great story to tell.

 

Thanks for reading, and have a super Tuesday.  And next time you hear someone say, “You’ll shoot your eye out kid” keep in mind that shooting the hand is also a viable option.