Peer Pressure Works!

Actually, I’ll tell you now…yes. Yes it is. Oh, the gloop inside might be okay, but the cans are death traps just waiting for the chance to rip your children wide open!

Yes, I have just returned from the ER, having had to deal with the deadly aftereffects of dealing with a pet food receptacle. I have never liked cans with pull tabs that contain anything more substantial than beverages. They never really work all that well. You either have to exert the equivalent force needed to tear a phone book in half, or when they DO open, the top only partially separates itself from the main body of the can, leaving you fumbling to remove the rest (the rest usually held in place solidly enough to convince you that perhaps it was welded there).

Anyway, tonight I was dealing with just such a can…this particular one was being a right bastard and not coming open, obviously as a result of some delightfully prickish cannery employee who made sure it would be hard to open as a prank. Incidentally, nameless bastard…I respect the cut of your delightfully fiendish jib. Anyway, I reefed on the stupid handle, and just as the can started to open, my finger slipped out of the grip thing. I somehow managed to tear open the pad on my middle finger on my right hand…well, not tear open the pad, actually, they cut basically cuts up UNDER the pad. It was hanging there lain wide open with a nice flow of blood pouring out of the resulting gash.

Of course, my initial reaction was to curse and flail the hand around…resulting in a kitchen that ended up looking like the set of a slasher film as a result. I then grabbed a rag and wrapped the finger, holding it tight with the other hand. Then I noticed the blood all over the floor, so I knocked a roll of paper towels on to the floor, kicked it across the kitchen to unroll some, and proceeded to tear a big row of them off the roll and wipe up the blood with my feet.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, this is how screwed up my line of thinking is. Hmmm…bleeding profusely, obviously need stitches…I’d better clean up the floor as best I can. Of course, I AM the son of a man whose first words to me after breaking his leg on the stairs were “Son, I think I broke my leg. You’ll have to finish the laundry.”, so clearly it’s some sort of genetic brain limitation. So, up the stairs comes the aforementioned father (Oddly enough, having just started a load of laundry!), and away to the hospital we go. It’s the usual succession of…”Wait a minute…Riseborough…are you related to MARY?”, Mary being my mom and also a Registered Nurse at the hospital and the like, a quick triage where I show them my cut, and then waiting to be seen.

The waiting room is always such a colorful place. There’s the person who won’t shut the Hell up (in this case wearing a gauze mask. Hey, if you’re infected with something communicable to require wearing a protective barrier so that you don’t breathe it towards the innocent, could you maybe STOP TALKING TO PEOPLE?!), the grumpy person who really doesn’t have anything wrong with them (in this case a surly gentleman who seemed to have the sniffles) but who complains vociferously whenever anyone goes in before them (it’s especially endearing when the person whines that someone who is wheeled in on a stretcher gets priority). There wasn’t much of a wait…I was second after a sick little girl went in (To much eye rolling and head shaking from Capt. Important, no doubt).

I’ve never had stitches before, amazingly. Once or twice I SHOULD have had them, but those fit in to one of two categorical reasons why I didn’t bother.

1. I was a little kid, and my first instinctual reaction was “Better cover this up so I can go back and play some more!” I once fell of my bike and spent a good 10 minutes slapping one bandage after another over an opening in my knee until I had a mountain of blood caked band-aids on my leg. There must have been at least 15 or 16 of the damn things on there. Oh, and mom was THRILLED when she saw it a few days later. See, I hadn’t done any of that ‘clean the wound’ stuff. It was oozing something greenish. Yeah.

2. I just didn’t think of it. I was cut, I wrapped it, it stopped bleeding, I went back to work.

So this was a whole new experience for me. It’s a very strange thing. I’m lying down on my back, the doctor’s looking at my hand and he tells me I’m actually quite lucky. Had I cut straight down I would have embedded the can lid (or shuriken, as I’m sure it was) in a finger bone. Great, cause I FEEL lucky! So, he gets everything set up, gets the finger pulled through some other sort of gauze pad that separates it from the rest of my hand, and sets my hand down…on a large, cool pool. I was a bit surprised he had put a bunch of alcohol on the main pad my hand was laying on…then realized that was actually a large mass of my own blo0d. Niiiiiiiice. Finally he freezes it (and holy shit does that burn for a few seconds before the whole numbness thing cranks up) and starts stitching it.

We conversed the whole time, but I watched him work (Seeing my own blood or someone dealing with an injury has never bothered me).  Every time he started a new stitch I’d start grimacing in anticipation of the pain that never came, leaving me feeling kind of retarded. Nonetheless, 7 stitches later, we were…oh…nope…wait…needs more. Okay, 8 stitches later, we were done. Got a new tetanus shot, got it wrapped up (my finger is basically wearing a goddamn coat. Considering the weather, it kinda fits), and that’s that. Now the freezing is wearing off, leaving me with that “Oh, my foot fell asleep and is now returning to horrible, prickly consciousness!” feeling. I can’t get it wet for 2 days which means I get to wrap it in a plastic bag to take a shower. Stupid cat.