Extra story in picture captions. And vestmaking. :D



I was an adventurous 5 year old. Back in Marsden, a suburb in Logan, the closest you can probably get to an engineered slum in Brisbane.

My dad made his own home brew, cheap beer is good beer and back then he bottled it in large brown tall neck glass XXXX bottles and stored it on an old 80's style bar under the highset house. There was a lot of stuff under that house. the couch the dogs slept on, a cupboard for all our camping gear, a camper trailer covered in junk, dads workbench, all sorts of bits and bobs.

One morning, before school, two days before Easter, the last day of term at primary school, I was downstairs playing under the house with my sister jen. I can't recall what we were playing but I had gone behind the bar and hid. Whatever happened and I decided to climb up on top of it instead of onto the couch beside it like normal, so I placed both tiny 5 year old hands on top of the bar, hefted my small 5yo foot up onto the first chipboard shelf and pushed upwards.
I can't recall if I took another step but the shelf I had stood on gave way, for it carried the weight of twenty large full glass homebrew bottles and the weight of a 5yo boy, being chipboard it wasn't pleased with that sort of punishment and its structural integrity failed and sent all twenty bottles cascading onto the twenty bottles on the floor below it followed in a haphazard fashion by a 5yo boy.

with a crash and smash the boy found himself standing, still standing, in half matured lager amidst a field of broken glass. he looked down at his bare feet and saw his leg, splayed open right the way from an inch above his ankle to just past his knee, dripping blood into the darkening pool of frothy beer. his leg was twice the diameter it normally was with a large 30deg incision down to the, was that bone?

Drew was in shock, it didnt hurt at all. but legs shouldn't look like that. so he navigated out of the glass field and dripping blood on the cement floor from a forceful broken bottle incision that matches his adult handspan to this day, fled upstairs and across the dining room, down the hallway to the bathroom where his mother was showering.

"*BANG BANG BANG* Mummy! I've cut myself!" wailed the child as he hit the bathroom door with all the might a 5yo in shock can muster. blood dribbled down over his ankle and onto the cream carpet.
The door opened and steam poured out off the bathroom, "what have you done?" his mother started disdainfully wondering what her accident prone son had injured himself with now, the nonchalant worry turned to terror as the full extent of the wound was assessed. "Oh Shit!"
With a towel wrapped around her his mother carried the pale bleeding youngster into the dining room and wrapped his leg in a tea towel and held the flapping meat closed. she instructed his sister to fetch the neighbour who arrived promptly and continued to hold the childs leg together while his mother put some clothes on so she could arrive to the hospital not naked.

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time breaks down around here and events dont mate up with any form of timescale i recognise, somehow i was in emergency with a bloodstained teatowel holding my leg closed, then getting a local anaesthetic which would begin my long term aversion to needles and then being sutured up.
i emerged from the hospital with fifteen stitches in a footlong gash down my rather short leg, and another two in my ankle that somehow got injured a the same time. wrapped in bandages i made it home to lie on the couch with my foot on a pouf.
i was supposed to go to the Currumbin bird sanctuary for a school trip today. and we were going camping the next day.
so i spent a week at the bunya mountains in a tent, with my leg bandaged and sutured, bathing it every few days and eating Honey Wheats for breakfast.
I terrorised the local wildlife and ran up mountains, went bushwalking at breakneck pace and worried my parents sick that my stitches would burst, two hundred kilometres from the nearest hospital.

today i still dont know why my scar didnt heal to a thin line but is instead a centimetre wide slash of scar tissue that refuses to grow hair or nerve endings, and hasnt grown with my leg, which is now twice as long as when i was 5. One doctor has said its kieloid scarring, another says its because i have a lot of elastin in my dermis.

whatever it is, I have a big-fuckoff scar on my right leg.