All us Hockeys got to visit the hospital fairly often when we were kids. We were what you might call accident prone. If we were not seeing a doctor for acute alcohol poisoning we were in having a limb sewed back on after losing it in a street hockey game. Good thing we did not bother seeing a doctor when we were simply concussed or we would have been seen twice as often by Canada's famed healing system.
In the boxing world us Hockeys were what you would call a bleeder. Our skin broke easy but our bones held firm. Even our veins spurted when we got nicked.
I had to be concussed just to get me in the hospital. As far as I was concerned all the doctors wanted to do was check out the temperature in your ass with one of their always handy glass thermometers.
The family car, a white station wagon, even looked like what ambulances looked like back then. Good thing the car came with plastic upholstery and flooring that could be and often was hosed out.
Mom, dad and the grandparents also took a few turns in the back of the wagon. My dad was a natural ambulance driver but my mom got more room for herself on the road when she was in a hurry because not too many women drove in those days. Women drivers scared the shit out of men. Other drivers got out of her fucking way when they saw her eyes, magnified several times by tremendous cat glasses, daring any motherfucker to get in her way.
Us Hockeys were good healers. Practice makes perfect I guess. We have not yet begun to make use of the healing system available to us in our humble, Communist country.
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I don't know what was the common mode for drying laundry over in Dope City when you were a kid, Beer, but over where I grew up - with a back lawn, luxuriously - my mother would hang a line between steel clothes poles which viciously jutted six feet out the ground. This was in the days prior to the invention of "whirleys". These poles carried 4 hooks around the circumference on which to tie the line.
One time my sister, six years my junior, leapt off the neighbour's fence only to hook her upper lip on one of these damn spikes. She went down of course and nearly had her entire face ripped off in the process. I have seldom seen such a copious letting of blood even though I have witnessed animal butchery in an abbatoir.
Anyhow, my mother was the first person on hand to transport her to the nearest hospital in spite of the fact she only held a learners' license. She got there quick, too, let me tell you, and despite the horrendous looking nature of the injury and its entailing swelling my sister's face miraculously healed with nary a scar.
We, too, are a family of 'bleeders'.
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