I Got Stabbed!

"Aling Lydia! Aling Lydia! Si Kulot ho nasaksak!"
("Miss Lydia! Miss Lydia! Kulot got stabbed!")

Aling Lydia is my Mom. I am Kulot. I was eight years old when it happened. And it was my friends who were shouting those carelessly chosen words, informing my Mom of an accident I met.

No, I was not the youngest member of the Sigue Sigue Sputnik who got caught in a gang war. And neither did I have an enemy mad enough to stab me. I was an adorable little kid. Really.

My playmates and I were playing one of our favorite games – street kickball. It’s a game very similar to baseball or softball except that instead of hitting a small ball with a bat, we were supposed to kick a football and run through four bases.

The football was kicked by one of my playmates and accidentally landed inside the front yard of one of our neighbors. Or in the lingo of street play, it went over-the-bakod. Unfortunately, there was no one inside the house. So we had to climb the fence ourselves to retrieve our ball.

You know how kids are. We had to race among ourselves to know who can get to the ball first. And so climb we did. The metal spikes of the fences didn’t deter our resolve to get our ball back.

I was among the first to climb the fence. As I was about to leverage my arms and feet to climb atop one of the cement posts, I felt something unusual touch my skin. It was in the inside of my right arm, just below the armpit. I took a peek as to what it was. And to my horror, my arm wasn’t just touched by something. The metal spike of the fence actually pierced into my arm. It was already about one inch inside the flesh of my triceps. There was no blood. Or at least, I don’t remember seeing blood flowing out from the wound. And the weirder thing was I didn’t feel any pain.

I immediately removed my arm from the metal spike and went down the fence. It only took a moment for my friends to realize what happened. And it was when all hell broke loose.

I ran home as fast as I could. My left hand was covering the stab wound on my right arm. As if I was so afraid to let blood drop from the wound. A few of my friends ran faster ahead of me towards the direction of our house to inform my mom as to what happened. As I was running, I was deciding whether to just faint and let my other friends catch me and bring me home.

Everything happened so quickly after that. My mom almost got a heart attack with the way my playmates broke the news to her. I was rushed to the hospital. And I got stitched up for the first time in my life.

The scar would later be a reminder of my daredevil recklessness when I was a kid.