Tattoos and Brands

[naraht]

Originally posted by CasanovaAPQ
ALOT of NU Iota bros have brands, Naraht why did u get those scars, what happened?

OK, the story. This is the Fall 1989 initiation ceremony at Kappa Chapter at Carnegie-Mellon. We had 18 pledges that semester and an advisor who was being initiated with them. We were in a lecture hall with chalkboards that slide up and down to reveal the ones behind them. We had completed the ritual, sung the toast song and welcomed the new brothers and were taking things down. I was taking down the flag and stood up on a chair to reach the tape on the top right corner when I slipped on the chair. The thing that I was using to support my right hand was sharp enough to take off skin and flesh on the palm side of my fingers as I slid.

Fortunately, there were three brothers there trained as EMTs (One of whom was in the class that just initiated) and one of them was going to be on duty that night (Carnegie-Mellon has hospitals close by so its health room is not open 24-7. They train students to be EMTs in exchange for being on duty one night a week). So while he called into the campus police on the radio for transport, the other two EMTs bound my hand up.

Well, you need to stop bleeding and you don't have bandages, so what do you have available that is long and relatively thin and made out of cloth? That's right, most of the blindfolds which had just come off the faces of the new brothers were used to stop the bleeding on my hand. After I got to the hospital, they used 8 stitches on the middle finger and 7 on the ring finger.

Since they could see the tendons in my fingers when they cleaned them up, it meant that if it had gone any deeper, I would have lost some flexibility and control in those fingers, I was fairly lucky.

BTW, I purchased cloth over the winter break and worked with the pledgemaster to make new blindfolds for the spring pledge ceremony.

Randy