A couple years ago I burned my right hand, in what was a very foolish maneuver. Basically I grabbed for a pan that was just under 350 degrees in heat. There was a sizzle and the blistering started almost immediately causing severe injury to my hand, but this was not the first time that I injured the hand, and I’d like to tell you a little story about it.

Let us travel back in time to the early teen years when I was in 6th and 7th grade.

a very young Heath

Picture a young Heath (ok, not THAT young but I couldn’t find a picture from middle school), sitting in a trailer at Ligon Middle School – a trailer because the school wasn’t big enough for all the students they had, so there were numerous trailers around the property set up as school rooms. This is relatively commonplace today since it’s a cheap way to expand your capacity.

It was math class, and I was sitting in an uncomfortable student desk scribing away with my mechanical pencil. It was probably Pentel brand (which I still use to this day). The smells of graphite and number 2 pencils filled the room, along with chalkboard and eraser – the kind of powdery smell that brings back memories of being teased mercilessly by bullies who liked to throw erasers at my back so I would have a big white powder mark on my shirt. But I’m getting away from myself.

The brown carpet on the classroom floor was covered in little bits of rubber eraser after we added things incorrectly and had to fix the answer before turning it in. I think we all remember the smell of a freshly erased piece of paper, still smudged with graphite.

All was quiet and peaceful in the trailer.

The teacher was at her desk behind us, and the students were busily finishing their assignments. And then, it happened. Like a plot from a bad movie my sense of self-preservation flew out the trailer window and I stabbed myself in the hand with my Pentel pencil.

My full right hand

What I initially found odd about this is that I stabbed my right hand and I am right handed, which means that the mechanical pencil somehow found its way into my left hand before the stabbing occurred. This is actually the only part of the incident I found to be odd. Odd indeed.

But wait, it gets better.

Move forward a year into seventh grade. In a trailer. In math class. Busily working on a math problem when once again, it happened. Somehow the pencil found its way into my left hand and I stabbed my right hand again. Again I find it odd that I didn’t stab my left hand, but first switched the pencil.

In both cases it was a completely involuntary action. I didn’t stab myself knowingly, it just happened. So now I have two subcutaneous foreign bodies (graphite and clay from the pencils) embedded in my right palm. They are visible under the surface of my skin…and if you want it to get more freaky, they are approximately half an inch apart. Good aim younger Heath.

The arrows point to dark spots - those are the pieces of graphite.

I tried to scrape them out once…but they are too deep and really would require surgery to remove at this point. And so I keep them as a strange and distant memory of mechanical pencils and junior high math classes. Ah, memories.