Over the holidays I burned my right hand. It was a foolish maneuver in which I grabbed for a pan that was just under 350 degrees in heat. There was a sizzle and the blistering has started, but this is not the first time that I have injured this hand.

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

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.

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 brown carpet on the floor was covered in little bits of rubber eraser after we added things incorrectly and had to fix the answer before turning it in.

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.

What I find 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 story I find odd. Odd?

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 to get more freaky, they are approximately half an inch apart. Good aim.

Let’s see some pictures…first  you’ll see my entire hand, then we’ll zoom in on the two foreign bodies under the skin near the base of my thumb.

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