The Story of Scabby

I had a somewhat emotional weekend, which I mostly attribute to the pain I was feeling from a freak finger-crushing accident and the subsequent ten stitches I had on my middle finger on Friday.

Bill was camping all weekend, and I didn't want to be alone after the accident, so I called my parents. My mom was out of town on a work trip, but my dad was at home, recovering from the flu. My friend, who'd sat with me at the hospital, took a Lyft with me to my parent's house.

My dad had prepared a huge bowl of chicken soup, which we ate together and then went to bed, both feeling physically defeated. My finger was still pretty numb from the shots they gave me at the hospital, and I took a painkiller, which made me drowsy. Thankfully I went to sleep in my parent's comfortable guest bedroom pretty easily.

Saturday morning came and I slowly began to feel better and better. By the evening, I felt optimistic about my recovery. 24 hours had passed since the accident, so I prepared myself to change the bandage. I slowly unwrapped the gauze until it started to stick to itself from the leaking blood. It had leaked through about four layers of bandage and as I continued to unwrap, each layer underneath became redder. When I got to my finger, the bandage stuck. I took a deep breathe and pulled it off. Seeing that it continued to leak blood, I started to cry. I'm not sure what I'd expected, but it wasn't the mess that I saw. I became squeamish and panicked slightly - acting like a child for my dad. We called the nurse hotline at Kaiser and she explained that it wasn't unusual for it to be bleeding - that I probably pulled off the scabs that had developed when I removed bandage. I became more upset and moaned that I'd reversed all the healing (which wasn't true), and then even more distraught when the nurse mentioned that we had purchased the wrong bandaids.

My dad, who was still recovering from being sick, went back out to get the correct bandage for me. Then, because I could barely look at my own finger, he tenderly wrapped my finger with the correct non-adhesive bandage (which was impressive because of his history of fainting at the sight of blood*).

Once it was wrapped again, I started to calm down. In moments of panic and vulnerability, I usually want my mom to be there. She is so warm and effortlessly calming. However, in this moment I was so glad to be with my dad. He put a pillow on his lap and told me to lay down. I felt calmer now, but tears still occasionally streaked down my face, as I tried to take deep breaths. It had been 24 hours since my finger had been torn apart, and this was the first time I cried.

We had been discussing Disney movies earlier in the day, and he started talking jokingly about a potential Pixar film with ambiguous, round personified characters named "eeby" and "tuny" who face and overcome adversity. In the end, he said, it's revealed that they are skin cells trying to heal a girl's wound. Then it went from a hypothetical film to a story he began to tell.

"They (the skin cells) all have different, quirky personalities," he said as he calmingly rubbed my head. "And then there's 'scabby' who's misunderstood, but who saves the day. And the brain sounds like a wise, old African American woman."

He went on to talk about how the nervous system kept crying to the brain, who got frustrated. "I get it! You don't need to keep telling me the finger is hurt!" Said the brain. "Stop complaining, and get to work!"

"In the end, the skin cells work with Scabby to heal the wound, and the girl gets to run around and play again," He concluded.

By the end of his story, my finger seemed to be throbbing less intensely, and I was now too comfortable and tired to cry.

My dad used to tell me stories all the time when I was a kid. Often they would relate to something I was going through at the time. I never realized until that moment how much these stories calmed and healed me.


*He's literally passed out in line to give blood before.