Scrambling for something in the dark is especially annoying when you don't know what you are looking for.
My neck continued to gush…

Over the years since the discovery of my accelerated healing, I have come to rely on ONE thing: that it is UN-reliable.
After a car accident a few years ago, I had a chunk of concrete the size of a deformed child's mangled fist lodged under the skin of my left bicep, intruding on the layers of muscle that lie below the surface. Immediately following the crash, I sat, leaning against the cement median that was still smoking from the subtle ignition of fumes from the friction of the metal, the concrete and the lead-based paint, and I WATCHED the concrete leave the same way it came in.
i Watched it!
I fucking watched it crawl out from the burrowed home it had built itself when it rammed into my muscle.
There was an itchy feeling first. Like when a new nose hair grows at the edge of the inside of your nose in what seems like an instant.
A feeling of something sprouting from under the skin in my arm overtook my upper arm, almost numbing it.
I can't be sure, but it felt like thousands of hair-like cilia blossomed from the intruded area and guided the rock out of my wound.
And the wound closed.
No pain.

But I've also had tiny scratches take 2 days to heal.
These combined experiences, along with a ton more, are the reasons why my "gift" is so unreliable, and why I am still hesitant to view it as a "gift".
In an imaginary world where this gift WAS reliable, I would have had the perfect scam. I could charge rich, deranged people extremely high prices to stab me, or shoot me, or shove dynamite in my mouth, and I could heal right before the eyes of a skeptic audience.
But I couldn't take that chance. Especially after hearing about the man who surgically implanted a cat's soul into his body so he would have 9 lives and could pull a similar scam. A huge audience of thousands pays to watch you die. Then you come back to life. After 8 times, you are a millionaire.
But that man miscounted, and spent his last life being buried alive.
Not me.
Not this gift.

So, I guess what I am trying to say is that, with the blood hurrying out of my throat and soaking into the neck and chest of my t-shirt, I doubt I could wait for my "gift" to kick in. I was going to die from blood loss, on top of hunger, on top of fatigue, on top of dehydration, on top of Ol' Smokey for fuck's sake. I need to close the wound.

Fumbling around in the pitch black among obstacles I can only describe by the squishing sound they make when I run into them, I managed to break off a sliver of wood from a floorboard long enough and sharp enough to act as a suture needle.
I used one of my shoelaces as the thread.
I have never had to dress my own wounds in severe darkness with a shard of wood and a dirty shoelace before, but I would guess I did a pretty good job, because the bleeding stopped soon after. There was a new pain, however, from the wood breaking off even more tiny slivers into my wound as I quickly wove it in and out through my flesh and my fur, waving my left arm as if I was conducting some sort of retarded orchestra.

I spent a moment to catch my breath, but all that happened was I inhaled an oh-so similar stench of wet death, and I remembered where I was….