Lynchburg

 I was not the most coordinated kid growing up.  I got picked last for all games in school.  I would try to do good, and sometimes I would do better than was expected, but I would always be picked last.  Even when I did get picked, the looks on the faces of the other players showed disappointment.  I have already shared about getting coal in my knee from a fall.  I fell a lot. 
 In 4th grade, I was playing football with some of the neighborhood kids.  I fell and broke my thumb.  It was on a Sunday, and the break was on my right hand.  The hand with which I write.  So, they took me to the hospital that afternoon.  While we were sitting in the hallway to be seen, a man came in covered in blood from head to toe.  It seems that he fell into a combine on a farm.  It was gross.  The doctor set my thumb and put a big cast on my hand.  I had to write with my left hand.  If people thought I had bad handwriting before, it got a lot worse.  Along about Wednesday, my thumb needed to be reset.  This time, I would have to have surgery.  They gave me something to knock me out, which caused hallucinations.  A 4th grader on something akin to LSD.  They put me in a room with another kid, and we talked a lot.  When I came back from the recovery room, the other kid wasn't there.  When I asked where he was, they told me he was gone.  I found out later that he had died during the night.
 After I got the cast off, my parents tried to keep me from falling again.  Things were okay until the day I fell down the front steps of our house.  I injured my right elbow.  It wasn't broken, but it was badly bruised.  That summer, we went to Lynchburg, VA.  Daddy was doing a conference there.  I had a sling for my arm, which I just didn't care for that much.  During the week there, I developed an abscess on my arm near the elbow, so they took me to the nearest hospital.  It wasn't much of a hospital.  The doctor told me that he could lance the abscess, but he didn't have any numbing agent, so he gave me a leather belt to bite on.  The procedure hurt a lot, and I put teeth marks on the leather.  It was like being in the old West.  I still have a one-inch scar where the "doctor" worked on me.  I think he was a butcher on the side, maybe.