Jai Rohn - My Story of Blood, My Pride and Stitches (Patreon article) (Patreon)

Let me know what you think, this is the first of a few things we're trying to add to Patreon. This article can be read by any patron.

My brother is looking up at me from the area just around the corner of the ring. He's wearing my face on his T-shirt,  a black and white photo from my first Kard Chuek fight, where I was cut  on the forehead and experienced a kind of freedom in the ring that I'd  always dreamed and never tasted. My brother's hands are in his pockets,  which I would take for a casual pose except that he did this while  standing right next to live tigers a few days ago, so I know it's  probably a nervous habit as well. I'm kind of bouncing up and down,  feeling the warm trickle of blood moving from my scalp behind my left  ear down to my shoulder. I can always feel when I'm cut - it's a warm  feeling, incidentally. But I'm bouncing up and down and waiting for the  ring doctor, a young woman in a nurse's hat with a full set of braces to  climb the three steps up to the corner of the ring and take a look at  my cut.

"Dai, dai, dai," I keep repeating, meaning I can  keep fighting. Her voice is soft and moderately concerned as she  announces that there are three cuts to my scalp. But it's behind my ear,  so with some more repetition of my argument she decides to nod to the  ref and let me keep fighting. I wai my thanks to her and turn  back to face my opponent. My opponent spends the rest of the rounds in  this fight hammering those three cuts with her rope-bound right fist.  She's tall and accurate, reported a top Thai western boxer, so I'm just  eating these fists to my ear as I try to stay close. I can't feel the  blood anymore but I see it on her shoulder when we are pulled apart from  the clinch; between rounds I get gobs of Vaseline rubbed into my hair,  so it's just this mess but it does slow the bleeding. My frustration is  in the chase, not so much worrying about the blood, but in the last  round my opponent uses her reach to land a knuckle right on my left eye,  just under it, and it swells up quickly enough that I can't see out of  that eye for the rest of the round. This is Kard Chuek, so there are no  points and it's ruled a draw. Both of us have our hands raised and I  duck under the ropes near my corner to get out of the ring.

my opponent's rope-bound fist, reddened by my blood.

Immediately,  they want me to sit down so the doctor can look at my cuts again. I'm  annoyed by the fight now, feeling far more concerned about my eye and my  performance than the cuts, the feeling is building. The doctor kind of  blots at the cuts with a piece of gauze for a minute or two and then I'm  led back to the dressing area - which is open air - and told to lie  down on this short wall to receive stitches. There are many points of  discomfort at this point. I'm smiling at everybody I see because I look a  fright with my rapidly blackening eye and blood all over my torso, but I  feel terrible about the fight, it's eating away at me already, so it's  also super uncomfortable to be gawked at at this very moment, while the  doctor is setting up her equipment. My brother is standing near me,  totally uncertain as to how to comfort me, he's just visiting Thailand  for the first time, but says it was a great fight. I offer a lame smile  and busy myself with undoing the ropes from my fists. A few people try  to help and I'm already in full brat-mode, so I refuse the assistance.  That's when I could have turned my attitude around, but instead I fully  committed to my frustration. The doctor had me lie down on the little  wall and I had to awkwardly prop my head up with my own bent arm as  pillow, to form a steady position to receive the stitches. She wiped at  the Vaseline a few times and then I heard a little snip sound  and my hand shot up to cover my ear. "Don't cut my hair," I said (in  Thai). The doctor was completely stunned. The assistant and a man who  had helped me with my oil massage were equally unsure they'd understood  me. "Stitches are fine," I said, "but don't cut my hair." The doctor  assured me she would just cut a little bit, but that she needed to cut  it. I sat up and said, "it's okay, don't stitch me then."

I'd had a  long patch of hair shaved off the crown of my head from a few fights  ago, to receive maybe 6 stitches. It was a bald spot for a few days and,  being right in the front, I couldn't pull my hair back for training or a  fight without it being a bull's eye to any opponent or onlooker. When I  lamented on Instagram how I don't mind stitches at all but I hate when  they cut my hair, some responses were that cutting of the hair is  outdated and unnecessary. My personal issue with it is that stitches  take about a week to heal (to take them out) and then the remaining scar  becomes something I accept into my physical identity pretty quickly. I  have a scarred face, so the newer, redder lines are a bit of an  adjustment period but it's a quick acceptance and they start to fade  within a few months. When they cut my hair, that bald patch turns into a  scruffy patch, which becomes an awkwardly short patch and takes years  to be long enough to disappear. A scar is forever, hair grows back, but  accepting forever is much quicker than accepting a slow process back to  normal. So, that's my thing about the hair cut.

This is when  everyone's expressions turned to total disbelief. I'd suddenly gone from  this fighter, asking the doctor to let me continue to fight with blood  pouring all over me, to a bratty little princess refusing stitches  because it requires a few pieces of hair to be cut. Not only is it  unbelievable logically, it's also incredibly rude to be overstepping the  rank of a doctor... who is currently trying to help me. I was being a  total and complete ass, but I also felt a keen sense of panic over  wanting to have control - even a modicum - over this situation. Just  before the first snip of hair, my opponent had come over to apologize.  It's a common enough thing to happen after a fight like this, coming  over to apologize for hurting your partner in the ring, but in this  particular case it was 90% a chance to gawk at the work she'd done and  only 10% the customary apology. I'd beat this girl up in our first fight  together and she'd made fantastic adjustments to beat me up much worse  in this one. Both fights were draws, as both were Kard Chuek. But Kevin  later pointed out to me that my protest regarding the hair and how  strongly I resisted came immediately after my opponent was essentially  standing over me while I was waiting to be stitched. After much  arguing with Kevin in English and the doctor in Thai - my mother  turning on a tone I've not heard from her since I was a kid, "Sylvie,  you have to get stitches!" - I just gave up. "Fine," I laid down, "cut it."

The  doctor draped a thick aqua-green cloth with a hole centered just over  the wounds, so I was like a bird put to sleep in its cage. I could only  hear talking and feel the incredibly rough rubbing of the wounds from  the doctor - she was punishing me for my shitty attitude - and my  brother's hand on my ankle as she began to stitch me. Outside the cloth,  I could hear a bit of laughter from my mom, Kevin and brother, although  I don't know what about. In my own world, under the cloth, I winced and  gnashed my teeth in pain as the doctor thrust the needle through my  scalp and scrubbed at the blood. The whole thing took maybe 5 minutes  and after she'd administered 2 sutures she pulled the cloth off and this  blinding brightness revealed my tearful, pained expression. I've never  cried from stitches before, but here I was, rubbing tears from my eyes  as I sat up. It served me right, honestly, behaving the way I did. I  already felt a headache coming on, probably a combination of the blows  to the back of my ear and the stressed muscles in my face from wincing.  I'd had a headache from stitches only one other time, when a vein burst  and the vein itself had to be stitched - God, that was awful - and the  pain is so bad in the headache that it's nauseating. So, feeling  thoroughly sorry for myself by having to let the doctor cut my hair (she  did only cut a little area, but for 2 fucking stitches), and my eye now  totally useless to see out of and ballooning up every second, I hiked  up this little hill to rinse myself off and change out of my fight  clothes.

After maybe 30 minutes I had to go find the doctor and apologize to her for being "jai rohn,"  or what we might call "hot headed." She smiled, flashing me her braces  as she set up for another round of stitches on a guy exiting the ring,  and said it was no problem at all. Nurse Ratchet had already punished me  for my attitude, but the apology was clearing the slate a bit. She  might be my doctor at another fight and a grudge is the last thing I'd  want, but even if she never sees me again, she let me keep fighting. I  was already in her debt when the ordeal started.

Stitch count, now at 170.