Week 8 Authorial Presence

About a week ago, a problem arose for me. That problem was baseball practice. Or rather, what occurred during baseball practice. And that, namely, was taking a line drive to the face.

There were only about six players at the practice, and only three outfielders, so one was catching the throws coming in, and the other two were fielding. But the coach kept it to a quick tempo, so I would have time to sprint up and field the ball, throw it in, turn around, sprint back to where I started from, turn around, and the coach would hit the next one to me.

All this rapidity was tiring, which generally is not a problem except that I lose my focus a little bit when I am getting exhausted. This generally just means that eventually I might misplay a ball. Which is what happened, but with severer consequences this time. The coach hit a line shot deep behind me and to my right. I sprinted back for it, looking that I would probably have to jump to make the play. But I was a little faster than I had anticipated, and did not adjust like I usually would have, still jumping when I could have just lifted my glove higher. As it was, it went just under my glove, and because I was looking directly back for the ball, it hit me square, just above my mouth.

I went down for a second, mainly concerned because I remembered one player's account of how he had gotten hit in the face by a throw and had broken his nose, and not noticed anything except his face being numb, and had kept practicing until his nose started shooting blood.

My face was pretty numb as well, and one of the players ran over to me, concerned.

"Are you alright Tomas?" he asked.

"I'm good."

"He's good!" he said to the coach, as the coach walked over.

"You need to go wash the blood off," he said.

I looked down at my shirt and there was a good amount of blood on it.

I went into the dugout, where there was a sink, and washed my mouth out. I had gotten hit to the left on my upper lip, and had gotten cut there by the laces, which is what had been bleeding the most. What was also bleeding though was inside my mouth, where the entire upper and lower parts of the left side of the inside of my mouth were torn up by my teeth. I was lucky that it had not hit me right in the teeth or nose, but this did not feel great either.

And this ended up being the problem. The cut on the outside caused swelling, but after two days the swelling was almost entirely gone, and all that was left was a mark from the laces of the ball. In my mouth however, just as the swelling went down, the inside of my mouth started to hurt. And by hurt, I mean that any movement of my mouth, my tongue, etc., caused excruciating pain, to the point of doubling over every time I smiled.

Naturally, that made eating or drinking a challenge. But I was able to find a solution.

Tea tree oil is something that is quite expensive, but is very good at healing cuts and sores. I figured that I may as well try it in my mouth and see if it helped. So I applied some to the sores, and in about thirty seconds, I could barely feel anything, and I could talk, laugh, drink, etc., without any discomfort.

So what I ended up doing was putting tea tree oil in my mouth before I ate. I did this for about five days, until my mouth finally got better.

And then my coach did a little "Knockout" style competition at practice, whoever missed a ball was out.

"As long as I don't actually have to get knocked out during it," I said.

"Yes, you don't have to get knocked out to win it Tomas," the coach said.

"I wish I had known that earlier."

And of course, I ended up almost winning the infield knockout drill.