It's gonna hurt a little bit.

As a kid I got hurt a lot. I started walking way before I was one. My mom would always say, "way before you were one you stood up and ran after your brother and you never stopped running." I remember getting stitches in the back of my head after cracking it on the fireplace mantel after getting thrown from my horse. The horse was my big sister Carol! I got stitched when I was hit by a car and my brake handle stabbed into my knee. I ember getting stitches in the top of my head from a rock my brother J had thrown at me from way up on a hill. I had my face stitched up after being bit by a dog, twice. I have to stop but there are more. I had at least a thousand bloody raspberries, scraps and abrasions. My dad was the go-to guy whenever I got hurt, but it was never easy because he was a merthiolate guy. It's the red stuff and my day wouldn't use the plastic little applicator  he'd use q-tips to fully soak the wound with the pailful topical antiseptic. Man it burned, but he would blow on it until the extreme pain would ease. My dad would always say, "this is gonna hurt a little bit." That was his way of saying get ready this is going to hurt a lot. But he always knew how to make it better. He say something like, "it's OK to cry like a little girl, I won't tell any one or if you'd cry a little bit you'll forget how much it hurts." Or he'd say about pain, "if you ignore it it'll go away or don't answer the door and let it in."

My dad once broke his back stepping out of a golf cart. When he would explain how he got the huge scars from surgery on his lower back he'd say in the old days golf cart wheels stuck out in the back and I was stepping out of the cart while it was still moving and it ran up the back of my leg and yanked me so hard to the ground while running over me it broke my back. They had to go in a fuse a butch of discs so I could get feeling back in my leg. This was before I was born but I have a lifetime of memories of him laying flat on his back in  almost every room in the house whenever the back pain would be too much. I remember many times coming into a room and wondering if he was still alive. I would do a belly flop on hip and he yell, "DO NOT HOP ON POP!" I do this with my girls and my back hurts too. Or I should say they do it to me and it makes me think of him and I smile.