Daniel tried to kill me

Why am I laying on the porch waiting for an ambulance with a tourniquet on my upper arm, a towel cinched with a belt around a hole in my forearm, surrounded by Daniel's football team, while one of them is praying for me?  You know it is bad when the football team is praying for you.  It all started innocently enough with a football team party in our back yard.  Daniel invited his team over and I and my two sisters put on a hot dog dinner for about 20 guys.  After the meal was done and the food put away one of the players broke out the ice cream bars which he had in a cooler with dry ice.  Eventually the natives became restless, they did a little boxing with Daniel's boxing gloves, went over to Mullaly field for a while then came back and Daniel needed to do something to make the event more memorable.  I was in the house laying down resting after cooking and feeding a bunch of hungry guys and Daniel called me on my cell phone.  He wanted to make a pop bottle bomb, but he didn't call it a bomb, he called it something else- later the state policeman called it a bomb, but I am getting ahead of myself.  The conversation went something like this- "Hey Dad, OK if we make a pop bottle rocket?"  "What's that Daniel?"  "We just take some dry ice, put it in a 2 liter bottle, add some water then throw it into the field and in a minute or two it explodes making a big noise"  "No Daniel, that does not sound safe"  " Oh come on Dad we have done it lots of times- it is safe"  " No, Mrs Bliss will call the police on us"  " No she won't Dad, come on Dad, Trevor and his Dad do these all the time"  " No Daniel it just doesn't sound like a good idea to me"  "Come on please, please Dad?  You can talk to Trevor he will tell you it is safe"  "Well....... OK I will talk to Trevor"  So I go outside and talk to Trevor, now I ask you, why would a grown man think a 16 year old kid could give him good advice on what is safe and what isn't?  Trevor tells me he and his Dad do this a lot and it is perfectly safe.  I decide to trust his judgment- but I will stay out there and supervise just to make sure it is safe.  The trouble is Trevor did not make the pop bottle bomb that day, Daniel made it and Daniel does not know how to make one.  So the first one he put together is a dud, it just sits out in the field and does nothing.  The second one is going to be much better though because he uses  a smaller pop bottle,  and more dry ice than the first one.  I hold the bottle while he puts all the mixture together, and sure enough this one looks good, it is steaming strong as soon as he adds the water.  Then Daniel screws the cap on, I step back while he starts to throw it.  But just as he throws it it explodes and the bottle tears apart and the cap shoots back behind him.  This all happens so quick that I only hear the explosion and I jump from surprise.  But then what is that burning feeling coming from my left forearm?  I look down at my arm and blood is pulsing out of my arm at about the same rate as a heartbeat.  This is not good and I tell someone to call 911.  Josh Glick takes somebody's cloth belt and puts a tourniquet on my upper arm.  Daniel not to be outdone, raps a towel around the gaping hole in my arm and cinches it down with a belt.  I hold my arm above my head to slow the bleeding and head for the porch to wait for the ambulance.  The 911 dispatcher tells Daniel to get the bleeding stopped and he tells them it is, then they tell the ambulance it is a non emergency run since the bleeding is stopped. While waiting on the porch a state policeman shows up and asks me why we are making bottle bombs.  I start to worry that maybe I will need to go to jail right from the emergency room.  But he lectures the guys on being safe and leaves.  He probably doesn't want my blood in the back seat of his car.  I waited on the porch for what seemed like a long time before the "non emergency run" ambulance arrived.  Once the EMT got there he took off the towel around my arm and pulled out the bottle cap that had made almost a perfect hole there.  He also seemed really puzzled that I wasn't bleeding very much.  Once we got in the ambulance and he started cutting off my favorite plaid shirt with scissors he was pretty shocked to see the tourniquet on my upper arm and asked why we hadn't told him about that.  I guess I just didn't think about it.  Once we got to ER about 6 people surrounded me, three on one side trying to figure out how to stop me from bleeding and three on the other side trying to get a blood sample.  I told them they should just switch sides but they didn't.  Turns out I had a ruptured artery in my forearm and it took a couple tries in surgery to get it patched back up.  They stripped a vein near my wrist and used that to put the artery back together again.  The surgery nurse told me a couple weeks later (when she called to see if I wanted to go out on a date of all things- what did I say to her under anesthesia I wonder?) that the first attempt to put it together failed and it came apart when they took the clamps off it.  I ended up in ICU so they could hook me up to monitors and make sure it stayed together and healed OK for a few days.  They also did some skin stretching over the hole so you couldn't see the artery move every time my heart beat.  Later Daniel apologized, I forgave him, he said he needed to be more careful, I said I needed to be better at saying no to him.  All was well.  I got a month off work and my arm is a good as ever.  (By the way I did not go out on the date.)