One little Victoria jumping on the bed …

Graphic by Leyna Chan

Moments before disaster

When I was 4, I read a story called “Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed,” which followed the storyline of each monkey falling and cracking their heads. 

I thought the monkeys were so cool for jumping on the bed and decided to try it myself., I stood up on the bed and started jumping. 

Of course, my bed was not a trampoline, but 4-year-old me couldn’t make that distinction.

Of course, my parents told me to get off the bed before I could hurt myself. 

And of course, like the rebellious kid I was, I refused to listen. I thought that there was no way I could end up like the monkeys because I was agile and unbreakable. 

Just like the nursery rhyme, I also fell off the bed. Unlike the nursery rhyme, however, I did not hit my head. Instead, I cut my foot on a metal edge of the mattress, and it started bleeding profusely. Blood was everywhere, and it did not stop gushing from the wound. With the adrenaline running high, I didn’t feel the pain; instead, I started crying because I thought I would die from blood loss. 

My parents panicked after seeing me bleeding; they haphazardly bandaged my foot and immediately drove to the emergency room, where I proceeded to wait for 30 minutes before a nurse took me to the X-ray room and scanned for broken bones. Fortunately, I only cut my muscle and didn’t have any fractures. Still,I had to get stitches. 

After continued tantrums and being held down by my parents and the nurse, my foot was neatly sewn up. My parents drove me back home, and the anesthetics kept me wide-awake until 12:38 a.m., which was the latest I had ever stayed up at that age.  

Over the next few weeks, I forgot all the pains of my traumatic emergency room experience. It was an eventful night and still a story I lived to tell to this day. 

The moral of this unfortunate tale: Don’t jump on the bed because not only might you crack your head — you may also end up in an emergency room with a wilted, bleeding foot.