Bleeding Out in My Classroom

True professionalism means asking for support when we need it.

The date was Tuesday, January 6, 2015.

I was an eighth grade homeroom teacher living my best basement suite life in beautiful Vancouver.

I was shutting things down for the evening and preparing to go to bed. One of the last things on my list was a shower. Nothing unusual there.

Until it became?very?unusual. Moments after stepping in, I lost my balance. My left arm shot out and my elbow went through?the tile that lined the shower wall. Boom.

My arm suffered a deep slice just above the elbow — the kind that gives you a nice cross-section of flesh. Which I would have found interesting were it not for the river of red that immediately followed. My bathroom quickly became a crime scene.

Around this time, most ordinary people would have gone to the nearest hospital emergency room to have the slice sewn up tight.

Not this tough guy. It was late in the evening, and other than the gash on my arm, I felt fine. I was irritated by the accident and annoyed by the thought of leaving my home to go sit in an ER for who knew how long.

I’ll just bandage this up and go to bed,?I thought.?It’ll be fine in the morning.

Like a leaky faucet

When I woke up on Wednesday morning, things actually didn’t seem terrible. The bleeding in my arm appeared to have stopped. My bedsheets looked fine and free of the red stuff. It looked like my prediction of recovery was correct.

Thinking strategically, I bandaged up my arm the best I could before putting on a dark, long-sleeved shirt and a black, long-sleeved sweater. I figured that combo would be all I needed to hide any trace of my injury.?Just in case.

I was good to go and felt fine. Off I went to school.

I don’t remember every moment of the day that followed. But suffice it to say that as I moved my arm like a normal human being, the elbow slice opened back up. And it wasn’t pretty.

Despite my best efforts to re-bandage and fortify, absolutely nothing could stop the relentless trickle that followed. The blood was maddening — it started going through my bandages, then my shirt, and then my black sweater.

I tried to hide the whole thing from students until they finally started to notice I had a problem on my hands. I was forced to sheepishly admit what had happened the night before and the challenge I was now facing.

One moment from that day stands out in particular. I was in an English class, trying my best to teach a grammar lesson. The bleeding?was not stopping,?so in desperation, I pulled a garbage can beside the table at the front of the room and positioned it below my elbow while I sat.

To their incredible credit, my sympathetic students followed along with my lesson the best that they could, despite the wacky drama unfolding before them. I can only chuckle as I recall the various looks of admiration and stares of horror around the room as the slow drip of blood fell like drops of water from a leaky faucet from the elbow of my sweater to the garbage can below.

It was so surreal. I couldn’t believe it was happening, but there I was, bleeding out in front of my students. More than anything, I mainly remember feeling irritated by the inconvenience of the whole thing.

Why in the world wouldn’t you call in a substitute teacher?

I’m sure you’re wondering that, and I don’t have a great answer. I’m sure it just boiled down to pure stubbornness — the kind of stubbornness that says that a serious athlete never stays down. I likely also wanted to avoid an embarrassing conversation with my principal — I didn’t want to become the story of the building that day — and I certainly didn’t want to put my colleagues in a position where they would be asked to do some internal coverage just because Tim had a little cut on his arm.

As you can imagine, that day couldn’t finish fast enough. But finish it finally did, and I drove immediately to a nearby hospital. Three stitches later, my arm was on the healing path.

True professionalism means asking for help, even when it’s humbling.

I tell this story mostly because it’s so utterly bizarre and laughable to me today. Seriously, how many teachers have found themselves in such a ridiculous situation?

Looking back, I actually don’t think it was overly stupid of me to go into school. Never in my life had I experienced a wound that hadn’t stopped bleeding, and I had every expectation that the day would proceed normally.

But if I could do things differently, I think I should have asked for help from my team much earlier in the day — as soon as my injury became a problem.

Get first aid involved. Call the office and ask someone to take over my English period. Request emergency coverage so that I could go to the hospital.

Professional pride is mostly a good thing, but sometimes it pushes us to silly places. We don’t like to inconvenience our colleagues and we may be reluctant to admit when we need help — especially when the issue seems as trivial as a little cut on the elbow.

But true professionalism doesn’t call us to be martyrs. Quite the opposite: it means admitting our weakness and reaching out for support when we need it.

For that reason, I encourage my teaching team to?never?apologize for needing help or calling in relief. We have physical bodies, and sometimes those bodies have limitations. There’s no shame in putting ourselves on the injury reserve.

It’s for that reason that my Day of Blood shall forever remain in the history books as an experience never to be repeated. For whoever needs to hear this, we don’t need martyrs in the classroom.

Take care of yourself, teacher.