Today I offer a bit of advice that may come as a surprise to many of my regular readers, since it concerns a subject about which I know little or nothing and have zero interest in learning more. But experience is the best teacher, and based on my own experience, I am well qualified to offer this bit of advice:

If you are planning to save a little money by self-piercing your ears, don’t use a bedside table to make the required hole. Anything — even an old rusty nail — would do a neater job of preparing your earlobe for a diamond stud (not that I’m recommending the use of rusty nail, either.)

How did I become an expert about using a night stand to pierce an ear? I can assure you that it was not through formal training, but it proved to be as easy as, well, falling out of bed.

After putting in a long day on Thursday, I arrived home just before midnight, took off my work clothes and lay down beside by sleeping wife. I must have tossed and turned for 10 or 15 seconds before falling into a sound sleep.

Well, maybe it wasn’t so sound, because I apparently continued to toss and turn while sleeping. Shortly after 1 a.m., I was suddenly awakened with a sharp pain on the right side of my head. I had fallen out of bed and hit the bedside table — hard, really hard.

“Are you OK?” my wife asked as my tumble from the bed awakened her.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I hit my head on the table pretty hard.”

As I started to get up, my wife quickly said, “John, you are bleeding! You need to go to the bathroom and clean the blood off of you.”

I had only been in the bathroom for a few seconds when I decided that just getting the bleeding to stop and cleaning up the blood was not going to be enough.

“I think I need to go to the emergency room,” I told my wife. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to need some stitches.”

No one would confuse the table that sits beside my bed as a sharp instrument. Even its corners are rounded. Nevertheless, I managed to hit it in such a way that the table completely tore my earlobe. It looked as though someone had forcefully ripped an earring from my pierced ear — except that I have never had pierced ears and don’t want any.

“I think it is going to take more than a Band Aid to fix this,” I told my wife as I wiggled part of the torn lobe.

Within minutes we were on our way to the emergency room at King’s Daughters Medical Center. When we arrived, I received one of the biggest surprises of the night. In all my previous visits to the ER (and I admit there have not been many), the waiting room had always been crowded, with many of the people — mostly children — seeking care for an ailment that to my untrained eyes did not appear to be an emergency.

But I can attest that at 1 a.m. Friday, Nov. 6 the waiting room in the KDMC emergency room was empty. As a result, I received immediate service.

Within minutes, the ER doctor on duty looked at my damaged ear and gave me a shot to numb the area. Meanwhile the nurse gave me a tetanus shot since I had not received one for probably 20 years. The doctor used six stitches to repair my torn earlobe, gave me some pills intended to prevent the wound from becoming infected and told me to return in five to seven days to have the stitches removed. (My diabetes doctor later told me to wait at least a week because — like most diabetics — it takes a little longer for my wounds to heal. I’ll let her take the stitches out instead of returning to the ER for such a routine procedure.)

As the doctor sewed me up, he asked me if I wanted him to leave a small hole for an earring. I told him that I had managed to survive 61 years without an earring and saw no need to get one now.

When I was 4 years old, my father nearly severed my left foot with a power lawnmower on the Saturday before Easter in 1953. I mention this only because I believe that was the last time I had received stitches. I may be wrong. I had some surgery just before moving to Ashland in 1979 that may have required stitches, but if so, they were never removed. My wife says I must have received stitches during a minor surgery later that same year, but I was awake for the procedure and am 99 percent sure I received no stitches.

So, after more than 56 years, I guess I was overdue for a few stitches. The doctor assured me that my lobe would heal. I sure hope so. I would hate to be forced to buy an earring just to cover the scar.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2649.