Our floor is a pretty boisterous one, and the guys who live here are prone to getting into certain predicaments that most dorms might not encounter. So when I hear someone running down the hall screaming "We have to go to the hospital!", I figured it was only a matter of time, really. But that shouldn't stop me from going to see what the fuss is about.
So I opened my door and headed down the hall to the next room, where the RA lives. Inside are Jimmy and Matt, my suitemates, and Chris, the RA. Jimmy's struggling to contain laughter, while Matt is feverishly pacing back and forth across the room yelling "It hurts! It hurts!" with his right hand clapped across a section of skin on his left arm.
You have to understand that Matt is not the kind of guy who admits pain easily - he's pretty athletic, and can take most of whatever's dished out to him. (He boxed a couple other guys on our floor with Sock'em Bop'em gloves once; someone cracked him on the jaw pretty good, then cut his cheek with an edge of the glove, and he just kept going.) So to see him basically panicking about whatever it was on his arm was somewhat unnerving, to say the least.
Eventually he calms down enough to show us what's under his arm, and Chris and I both freak out a little bit:
he's sewn a piece of string under his skin. A good solid four inches of black thread appears to be embedded just under his skin, with the ends dangling out both sides. He's waving his arm around and the string is staying put pretty well, and all the while he's demanding we go to the hospital. (At this point I freaked out a little bit more.)
Then all at once he stops yelling and starts laughing. Jimmy, who's essentially hidden over in the corner this whole time, cracks up again too. Chris asks what's going on, and it turns out what
actually happened is this:
They were experimenting with ideas for Halloween costumes, and figured out that rubber cement, when applied in a thin layer and dried, takes on a skin-colored translucent property, while still holding light things (like short bits of string) in place really well. Matt figured "why not try it?" and pretended to sew through his skin, then staged the whole "needing a hospital" bit to see whether or not it was realistic enough.
And that's how my first hospital alert this year became a false alarm. I'm sure it'll happen for real soon enough.
