h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It was 1957. I went to public school but my neighbor, Frankie, went to Catholic School. It was the weekend and we were out roaming (I was 7, he was 6). We past his school/church. He suggested we go play on the yard there. Being Jewish/communist, I was superstitiously reluctant to go in but, oh well (if only I had listened to my inner coward!). The yard was enclosed with a low (it must have been low given my height and what happened next) chain link fence - you know, the kind that has the last link exposed with the ends sticking up. We found what in hind sight must have been a climbing rope, as thick as my (then) leg. We were jumping around on it. Frankie gave it a yank while I was standing on it. I landed on the fence, impaled in my left ear and my upper lip, just to the right of my nose and above a major artery. That's less than an inch from both eyes. But my luck didn't end there. I wrenched my self free; miraculously, the artery bounced around the metal spike without tearing (or that would have been that). I stood there bleeding like a stuck pig. My hands went automatically to my ear and mouth. Blood was (or so it seemed) pouring off my elbows. Frankie asked to see what happened. I removed my left hand (the ear one). He screamed and took off). That's when I started to feel a little poorly. He must have run all the way home because as I was trudging along my big brother showed up looking for me. I knew I must be dying when he offered to let me ride his bike. As I was reasonably certain my ear (and quite possibly my head) would fall off if I dropped my hand, I declined. I got back to the house (I must not have been bleeding as much as memory insists since it was about 8 blocks and I was still alive when I got there) and my mother rushed me to the doctor's office (not the hospital, interesting that) where I got 30 stitches in my ear and 4 in my lip (the doctor went very pale and quiet when he saw the lip; I was much more worried about the ear - what if I ever needed eye glasses?). It was eerie listening to the thread going through my ear. It was a couple of decades before I set foot in a Catholic church again. I still try to avoid those fences.