I guess I have bad luck on Friday the thirteenth. It had been a good day so far on that particular Friday, October 13, 2006, and my family and I were getting ready for bed. I was in the second grade, and at the time I was living in Murrieta, California. My mom called to my sister and me, “Get your butts downstairs,” so we decided to race down the stairs to the tile landing at the bottom. I was winning our race, and as I hit the tile floor and turned, I tripped and fell forward. My sister almost stepped on me.

As I fell, I hit the white, soon-to-be-red tile landing. I screamed and cried and stayed on the floor. My sister helped me up and yelled, “Mom, Elizabeth is hurt.” As I was getting up, there was blood all over the white tiles, and it was dripping from my chin. My mom gave me a towel with a bag of ice to numb my chin until we arrived to the ER. She called for my step-dad, “We have to go the hospital. Hurry up.” She was mad he was moving as slowly as a grandpa. He quickly changed out of his pajamas, so we could go to the ER while my sister stayed behind to clean up all the blood. I stopped crying in the car, but I continued to shake from being in shock.

We arrived to the ER, and the nurse took me to a small room with only a curtain as a door. In the small room, I sat with my chin up in the air, and they grabbed a big needle, which was from fingertip to thumb big and inserted it in my chin to numb it. Soon I couldn’t feel my chin, and they took me back to begin to stitch my chin.

As I went to a room in the ER where they put the stitches in my chin, I lay on the bed for about five minutes until the doctor came. While I was waiting for the doctor, I saw paramedics pushing a gurnee with a lady strapped down, having a seizure. I wanted to get out of the hospital as soon as I could; I wanted out. I was really tired. Soon after the doctor came in and asked, “How did you do that,” and continued to put a piece of paper with a hole for my chin over my face. Because there was a paper over my face, I didn’t respond. My mom told me later my chin was super gross and that she could see the fat in my chin because my chin was flapped open. The doctor began to stich my chin to reattach my chin flap to my face. It felt like he was pushing something metal into my skin. When he was finished, he put a Band-Aid over it and wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. I also received a huge sticker that read “Good job.” He stuck it on my shoulder.

I went home and showed my sister my chin and stitches. I looked in the mirror and examined the six black stiches under my chin. A few weeks later I went to my pediatrician to have the stitches removed. Because there was a scar, the pediatrician told my mom, “Buy some scaring ointment, so it won’t be a bad scar.” My mom bought some ointment, so I put it on multiple times day because I was scared to have a big, ugly scar on my chin. I still have a little scar under my chin, but I don’t mind it since I have a story to tell about it. Because I don’t have to greatest luck on Friday the thirteenth, I wondered what would happen in the future on Friday the thirteenth.