7 Stitches in Time

Or, you know, in my finger…though not anymore! No, they are now removed. There are advantages to having a parent who’s been nursing for 40 years. It was awesome during the days of street hockey, when I would return home from another night of somewhat organized savagery, call her up at the ER and request a package of gauze pads, triangle bandages and med tape to be brought home (and on at least one occasion asked her to pass on a greeting to Liam, who had incurred some sort of injury during the same game. And no, I wasn’t responsible…my game of choice for destroying Liam was baseball). And the time before this most recent one that my Tetanus booster needed updating, I got shot up in the kitchen…which beats making a doctor’s appointment. And this time, that same room was the location for stitch removal…once the cat was coaxed (thrown, actually) from the table (he’s shown a weird fascination with all things medical. Every single time I’ve been changing out the bandage, he comes running. At first I thought it was just the rustle of packaging…actually, he likes chewing on adhesive. Basically, he’s the kid who eats paint chips), that is. Now, unfortunately I couldn’t join my dad in healing thyself after an injury (remember that mention of his broken leg? Well, the day he was scheduled to have the cast taken off, I had worked the previous night, so I was asleep. I woke up, came up the stairs…and sitting at the top was a dusty hacksaw. I immediately knew he’d cut the damn thing off himself. Apparently ‘there was a line’ to wait to get his cast off. Miraculously, he was left without so much as a scratch) since I had no earthly idea how exactly stitches get removed.

Apparently some stitch/suture removal kits have really crappy plastic forceps! Wow, THOSE are a delight! Four or five attempts to grab and pull that stitch of thread laced through my flesh before it was finally ‘in position’ for snipping! Huzz-fuckin’-ah for that! At least they’re out now. The cut, by the way, is a sort of jagged smile…I basically have the visage of The Joker’s mouth on my middle finger, which is a little bit awesome. Perhaps I’ll snap a photo of it at some point. And the whole area that was lifted up when it was laid open is this half-moon bruise. And since this is the first time that what’s left of the cut has been exposed to air since the stitches were put in, it’s goddamn cold (ever grow a beard, then shave it off? Remember how your face was frozen for the first few days? That feeling). And I keep getting this sensation of something flowing down my finger. Of course, I immediately think “Oh shit! It wasn’t healed enough yet! Blood is pouring!”, look, and find…nothing. Nothing but that jagged grin looking back at me. The bastard’s playing his sick jokes on me…and I keep falling for it. Oh, it’s on finger…it’s on. One word of warning…I’ve seen Evil Dead 2…I know how to deal with you if you start smashing things in to my face. And that hacksaw is still around here somewhere…