A Paperclip and a Bunsen Burner

Amongst myriad infamous scenes in that movie, A Christmas Story, is the one where the kid drops the lug nuts and says "fuck" in front of his dad in slow motion. Subsequently, his mouth is washed out with soap. I've always hated that movie because I have a low tolerance for corny. I hate The Goonies, too. 

To the point, I lived that scene. When I was seven, I slammed my finger in my mom's car door and said “fuck” or “shit,” I don't remember which. My mom didn't care about the cursing but ran around the car to see why I was leaping and crying in the Kroger's parking lot. "What's wrong? What happened?" 

That night, my middle finger swelled and swelled and hurt so bad I couldn't sleep, turning purple underneath the nail. The next morning, my mom took me to an urgent care clinic to see what they could do. When we went back to see the doctor, the dude came in with a bunsen burner, didn't say a word, only took a paperclip from his pocket and unbent it into a straight, little rod. The guy had a flair for the dramatic. Perplexed, my mom and watched as he held the paperclip in a big tweezer/prong thing and heated one end to red. 

"Please hold his hand," he told my mom, and I think it was dawning on us what was about to happen. The doctor tapped the hot end of the clip to my purple nail, and a thin jet of blood shot toward the ceiling, like popping a pimple. It hurt for a millisecond, and my finger felt better—almost one hundred percent. 

My mom let me stay home from school, which, being a child, I thought was awesome, even though I liked my third-grade teacher. On the way home, she drove me by Speciality Video, our town's other video store (as opposed to Blockbuster). Neither of us knew what it was, but she let me rent Vampire Hunter D. I thought the box looked cool.  

Turns out Vampire Hunter D is not especially appropriate for seven-year-olds. If you care about them seeing tons of blood and animated boobs, anyway. My mom had to go to work for a few hours, so she didn't see the movie. I loved it. 

Over the next few days, my fingernail died and came loose. My dad yanked it like a baby tooth. This didn't hurt, but the anticipation of pain was almost as bad as slamming it in the first place. A new nail had already begun to grow underneath the dead nail and was more than halfway over the skin underneath. By the way, the skin underneath your nail isn't any different from the rest of your skin. It's just got more nerves. This aids the sense of touch. 

Epilogue: To this day, I cannot watch a filmed scene depicting violence toward fingernails/toenails. Gore porn movies, i.e. Saw or Human Centipede, don't bother me in the slightest, but the moment a nail comes out, I cover my eyes and ears, saying, "No no no no no…." If I were ever in some CIA/KGB torture situation where I thought my nails were in danger, I would immediately give up the goods, no matter the ramifications. I'd give up national secrets, my wife, my child–anything. I told my wife this once while watching some shitty spy movie, and she just said, "Well, that's why you're not one of them (a spy, presumably), babe." For some reason, that hurt my feelings.