My friends and I were outside playing hockey.
We were really just shooting the puck back and forth between the net.
A couple of other guys showed up and they wanted to play a pickup game. It didn’t sound terrible to me. There were four of us and four of them. We started playing and things got rough really quickly. The other hockey players thought we were playing full contact and we thought we were just hitting the puck around for fun. The game got intense quickly. One of the guys came up behind me and hit me with the stick. I felt the side of the stick jam into the side of my mouth. I felt an immediate and intense pain and then I saw blood all over the ice in front of me. My tooth was in the ice too. I went home as fast as I could. My mom was in the kitchen. I was yelling and screaming as I was running through the neighborhood so my mom heard me before I actually got to the house. She was waiting on the porch when I finally came up the stairs. I showed her my tooth and I opened up my mouth. She had to find an emergency dentist that was open on the weekends and this was 30 years ago. There was hardly anyone at all open on the weekends, especially a dentist. My mom and dad must have called everyone in the city, but they got a dentist to put the tooth on a post so I could keep it.