My Little Freak Show

 

I've been told that I was thrown off of my motorcycle and that I landed partially on the windshield of the car that caused the accident. I have a few pale scars on my arm that help to back up that story. It’s odd but I never really noticed them until a while back ago when my niece pointed them out to me.

A few months after the accident the cast was taken off of my arm and I began to work on making it functional again. One night as I lay in bed for the evening I felt something strange on my elbow that was both annoying and a little painful. I picked at it a little thinking that perhaps it was just some hardened skin, but instead I loosened a small object and held it between my thumb and index finger. To my surprise it felt like a grain of sand. When I examined it with the light turned on I discovered that it was a small piece of glass, no doubt from the windshield. I showed it to my wife and we were both a little amazed that something like that could have been lodged so deeply and survived for so long underneath my skin. The novelty wore off as the months advanced and I grew accustomed to picking tiny pieces of glass out of my elbow. They were always about the size of a larger grain of sand. After roughly two years of this it stopped happening and I figured that my body had finished rejecting all of the foreign objects from my elbow. It was to me a strange phenomenon, but I logged it within my mind as one of those things that you talk about with friends when there’s a lull in the conversation and you feel like sharing something odd about yourself.

Sometime around the three year mark I was sitting on the couch in my family room and I felt something uncomfortable on my elbow. I picked at it for a minute and felt a grainy object between my thumb and index finger. I assumed that it was a piece dead skin, but as I rubbed it a little my index finger started to bleed. I looked closer to discover that the object was a piece of glass. I showed it to my wife and we were both in disbelief that I was still picking glass out of my elbow after three years. A few months later I took out the last piece (assuming that no more remain!). It happened in my endocrinologist’s examination room while he was sitting next to me. I believe that he thought of it as a freakish thing, but he was too polite and professional to say it. Welcome to my world.