Let’s set the stage: I was 5 years old, my parents just got me a new bike, and I, like an intelligent kid, as soon as my parents left me and my sister with my babysitter, I immediately started swerving, and I mean, completely spinning, I’m halfway to a laundromat. I started getting a tiny bit of speed, now, acknowledge this is a hill.

 As I start gaining speed faster and faster, my heart starts beating faster and faster, my eardrums pounding. Then the brake chain breaks off from all of  the twisting and turning. As I fall off I hear, “JONAH!” my babysitter yells. I can’t see anything, I just instantly start crying, covering my eyes. As I feel something wet on my chin, I reach there putting my hand up to my face, and I just see movement and a whole lot of red. I wipe my eyes with my other hand, and just see my own hand in front of me, nothing different, just very, very red, I mean red as a rose, I was impressed, to be completely honest.

 By the time I had managed this, my babysitter had already got the car keys, and my sister, and had a box of tissues in her hand. She walked me into my bathroom to try and get some of the blood off my face, but that wasn’t going to work, instead, she tried to keep the blood there. It may sound crazy, but I might have bled out had she kept on trying to get the blood out of the hole across my jawline, that’s how serious it was. She had my sister and I run to the car, and I was crying my heart out, “How much farther until we are there?” at least 20 times before I started to calm down. I then realized that I might’ve just lost nearly 1/20th of my blood from being dumb.

 “Why didn’t you listen to Mom and Dad, Jonah? Why?” I muttered under my breath. Anyways, my parents called off work saying that their 5-year-old son was in the ER so that they can see me and my sister so my babysitter can go home. Colors start twisting a little, so I tell my babysitter, and she speeds up, I don’t know how fast it was, but I forgot I was in a car for a moment, I thought we were on a motorboat.

My dad and my mom are both doctors, and my dad wanted to but legally couldn’t help on the operation at all, even just giving the surgeons the right tools. Doctors can’t help family or friends because hospitals worry that personal connections could influence ER doctors’ decisions in the moment. The last thing I remember from the ER was just looking at my dad while they put the IV in me.

I woke up in the car on my way home, and my sister was talking about my little stitch goatee, with 2 stitches on the outside of my chin, which had three little black strings that were tightening my skin together, which was cool. I ended up being a pretty good biker, which really goes along with the quote “When you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.” by Banksy. And that is the story of how I managed to get 9 stitches just by trying to act cool.