During the course of your life there are a lot of challenges that you are going to face. Some of them are going to be emotional (like a heartbreak or loss of someone), others will be physical (like breaking a bone or a sprained ankle). 

While some people can say that they have gone through a lot of broken bones, I really cannot say the same. The only thing that I’ve ever broken is a tooth. And it wasn’t even my fault.

It all happened when I was in middle school. During those years, some classes had a different schedule than others. Two days per week, we would stay at school after lunch to complete our homework, or to study subjects where we were lacking, or to take care of a little garden that we had at the school. 

So usually after lunch we would have 15 minutes of break to either spend outside or in class chatting, and then classes would resume. 

One sunny spring day, we were outside playing, and one of our teachers asked us to work on the garden that we had. We all went over to help, and started working in the garden. Little did I know that, on that normal day during that normal spring, I would cry so much, and I would leave school without a tooth.

That day was the same as usual: lift this rock and put it in another place, plant this little flower, plant the new seeds. It was absolutely the same and oh so boring.

At last I found a way to make it more dynamic.

My teacher told me and one of my friends to hold a sugar cane while standing. So, we placed it next to the garden where only me and that friend were supposed to be. 

For a second I was standing, and then the next thing I knew, I was laying on the ground with pain in my mouth.

I discovered that two of my classmates (who weren’t supposed to be there) were playing baseball with a sugar cane and the sprout of a flower. 

The only problem was that I was standing next to them, and the guy with the sugar cane was trying to hit the sprout.

He didn’t hit it. 

He hit my mouth.

With the sugar cane.

When I realized that I was hit by the cane, the first thing that I did was laugh.

I know it sounds strange, but I found the situation funny. Yet after a minute of laughing, I realized that it hurt, and I started crying. When one of my friends came next to me, she noticed that my tooth was half broken. And then I started crying harder.

I couldn’t stop sobbing, so while one of my classmates called the teacher, some of my friends were trying to distract me and make me laugh. 

I was horrible. I kept crying, but I was laughing too. 

After a couple of minutes, the teacher called my mom to come and get me. That same day we went to the dentist.

I was kind of afraid of what was going to happen to me. I was scared of the anesthesia, because I was afraid of needles, and the doctor tried to convince me by telling me “if you want, I can do it with you”.

Now, imagine a 12-year-old girl scared of needles about to get a surgery to rebuild a tooth, hearing her doctor say that.

What I really heard was “I’ll put a needle in my body, so you can watch a grown man doing it which will make you feel like a baby because you are complaining about it.” 

I just said “no” and “shut up”. 

I don’t really remember the process, but I know that I didn’t feel anything. I think it took an hour, and afterward, I came out of the room with a fake tooth.

Now I just joke about what happened to me, because it actually is kind of funny.

I’m sure that I’ll never forget that year.