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Room 13: 15 yo male, lip laceration.
Sign me up. This is not like a high rise hotel that skips from floor 12 to 14 to avoid the unluckiest number. We are proud of our room 13. Being in the "Fast Track" area, it tends to get the unlucky patients that did unlucky things like "stepped on a nail" or "slipped on a boat". Not quite enough to get you into the trauma bay but enough to get you into Old 13. This happens to be where most of my suturing has taken place, so if you consider having a young PA student who believes in Trial & Error learning, pass needle and thread through your wound to be unlucky then it's the perfect room for you.

As soon as I made eye contact with the 15 year old, I knew I recognized him. He was me, about 17 years ago. He looked like me. He talked like me. OK, well he didn't talk like me, because his upper lip was swollen to the size of an orange slice and curled upward to the ceiling in a strange way. When he told me about the baseball he took to the face, I instantly was taken back to when I was hit by the ball. The stunned, starry, buzzing face that comes from only a hardball to the face is a feeling that isn't easily forgotten. Your ears ring. The temperature rises 10 degrees. The other kids look at you funny. The blood trickling onto your shirt....

When he told me it was a grounder, a bad hop, I knew that he also played second base, like I did. Although I never had stitches for any baseball related trauma, I felt this guy's pain, more so than any boating injury, birdfeeder mishap, or bronchitis so far. I was there with him, taking bad hops, bad throws, bad pitches. I felt the sting.

After deciding that the laceration did not cross the vermillion border, and thus not a plastic surgery case, I placed 8 stitches in his upper lip. I denied his mother's request to incorporate the lower lip into this set of sutures, despite her insistence that it would make for a quieter summer.

His summer is starting with a fat lip, but summer break when you are 15 cannot be ruined by such a minor insult. He has plans. He asked me if he could work tomorrow, and when he said he was a bagger/stockboy at the local grocery store, I almost laughed out loud. Again, almost two decades ago there I am: Bagging groceries at my local store, playing baseball, getting smacked in the face. All day we run around crossing paths with hundreds of people. Once in a while, one of them has the ability to take us back to the same burning pain we've experienced, as well as the same youthful joy that we've relished in.