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Friday, June 1, 2012

Drive myself or ask for a ride to the ER?

Well, I did it again. Ended up in the emergency room. Yesterday at 2:15 PM I decided I should eat something for lunch. A grilled cheese panini with my favorite Acme Olive Bread and my favorite Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam cheese sounded good and quick and easy.


Well, it's easy if you don't stab your finger with an 8" chef's knife, slicing it open as you press forward to cut to the bottom of the loaf of bread. Doh!

What to do. Well, first I called my mom who lives three states away because that's what you do when you hurt yourself right? She Googled for me how long to put pressure on a cut to stop the bleeding. When she read 5 minutes, and it had already been over 12 minutes and my cut would start bleeding the moment I took the direct pressure off of it, I decided I should go to the ER.

My first thought was to send hubby a picture once I drove myself there. Plan B was to call hubby at work and ask him to take me.

3:00. Time for coffee.

He dropped everything, rushed home, picked me up, and took me to the ER. He suggested I lean on him dramatically as we entered so that I would look more pitiful so that I would be helped sooner. I declined. I also told him I didn't need a wheelchair when he insisted maybe I needed one. LOL.

So he dropped me off, parked the car, waited with me for a little while then he ditched me left to go to Peet's Coffee because it was past the time for his 3:00 PM mocha. As a creature of habit he has a mocha at 3:00 PM every day. Rain or shine. In the emergency room or not. By the time he returned I had registered but was still waiting to be seen. Finally at 4:00 it was my turn.

Hubby took a picture of me rinsing my wound.

A quick assessment (with a lot of blood pouring out of the wound) and it was determined I needed to rinse the wound under a faucet for one minute, receive a a local anesthetic, and have two stitches put in. That would be followed by an application of a Neosporin type ointment and having most of my finger wrapped in a big gauze bandage.

When we pulled the gauze I'd been using as a pressure bandage away It had been over two hours and I was still bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig. At that point hubby asked if he could take a picture of all of the blood. I said no. Nobody wants to see that.

Fortunately I didn't need a tetanus shot since I just had one two years ago when I scratched my cornea with a ricocheting wood chip while I was trimming tree branches with an arial saw and didn't realize I should be wearing safety goggles. *Whew* Was that a run on sentence? It feels like a run on sentence but my finger hurts too much for me to care.

Moral Support

As the process of stitching me up began I suggested hubby could take a break from playing a video game on his phone and offer me some moral support. That's him giving me moral support.

(By the way this wasn't my first rodeo. I once had to have around a dozen stitches put into my foot when I tripped over a 4" long paint scraping razor blade. But that's another story for another post.)

During the stitching process hubby asked if he could video the stitches going in. He thought it would be really cool to film my surgery. "This isn't a surgery" I told him. He didn't believe me so I asked the Dr./Intern stitching me up. She shook her head no, laughing at hubby as she did. I told him no. I know I didn't want to see it later and didn't think any of you would either. I told him everyone would have to settle for a picture.


To see the stitches in clear detail, shot with my 45mm macro lens, just click on the image above. It's really not that bad. The cut is a reverse capital "L" shape and it's not even that big. Problem is neither is my finger so it's spanning the tip of my finger pretty well. I made it a clickable link to spare those of you who didn't want to see it :)

My new mummy finger all bandaged up and ready to go home.

It was getting close to 5:00 PM and I told hubby I was hungry because I never did eat lunch. He asked what happened to the loaf of bread I was slicing when I cut myself? "It's still on the cutting board" I replied. He asked if I bled on it. "I don't think so" I said. Then he asked if I was going to eat it when I got home. Um, no. "Why not?" he asked. "It's not someone else's blood. It's your blood so you can eat it." Seriously! He was serious!


At my insistence we stopped at a Subway. As I watched the girl slicing the bread to make my sandwich I told hubby it was like she knew and was showing off how easy it was to slice bread without maiming herself. She just seemed a little smug if you know what I mean. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Yeah. Come to think of it she wasn't smug at all.

If all goes well my finger will be good as new in one week.

The moral of this story is don't cut yourself with a knife because it hurts and can take 3 hours to get sewn up.

The End.

All of today's pics with the exception of the close up were taken by iPhone. I was too wounded to haul out my Lumix GF2.

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