stitches

Yesterday, I went surfing down at San Onofre for the morning. It was the last time I was going to go out for the next week or so, in order to get ready for school and save some tip money for textbooks and stuff. We had a decent sized swell come in over the weekend and yesterday was supposed to be the end of it. I was having a pretty good time, catching waves here and there but I kept noticing that at that area of the beach, the waves were "closing-out". if you're not familiar with the term, closing-out is where a wave breaks in two different spots. it usually occurs at beach breaks with sandbars that are constantly shifting, causing the water to become deeper or shallower at different sections. What results for surfers is nothing short of getting trapped. If you're surfing on a waist or leg-high wave, its usually pretty easy to jump over the curl of the wave out behind it. But yesterday the waves were about head-high. If you get caught in close-out on a head-high, you're going to get rocked.
So I took one on the chest yesterday and it knocked me off my board toward the beach. As I was in the whitewater getting tumbled, my board hit me in the face, right under the left side of my mouth. The force was so strong that my lower teeth sliced through my cheek completely. My initial thought was that i had lost my teeth since my mouth was so numb. but thankfully I didn't. I grabbed my board and road the whitewater to shore (considering I was about 100 yards out). what bummed me was that while i was worrying about my mouth, i ran my board into a rock and dinged the rail. My neighbor told me he will fix it, but i've had this board for a while and haven't dinged it yet. Bummer. Some guys on the shore helped me bandage my face up to stop the bleeding. Then I drove to St. Judes in Fullerton in a ton of traffic. I thought it was funny that i was admitted to the same room they took me to after that accident way back in 2001. My PA-C was really nice, she got me numbed up and sutured everything. It was hard not to laugh while she was working on me, she was pretty funny. Twenty stitches on the outside and inside of my lip. The RNs that helped work on me all complimented me on what a "nice set of smiles i had." i have a picture of me before they worked on me, but i decided that you can let me know if you want to see it, its pretty gnarly. in fact, it still kind of makes me dizzy looking at it.
Some residual carnage.


thank you guys for the texts/emails/calls/prayers. i really appreciate them. sorry i havent been answering, i pretty much slept all day.