And... Cut!

I suppose it’s a sign that an injury is not too grave if your first thought is “Save the sandals.” When I dropped a large, heavy, sharp, shiny chef’s knife on my left ankle, and the blood began to flow, I grabbed at the buckle of my spiffy Merrell sandals with the pale aqua suede straps. I raced the rivulets. The rivulets won. Blood dripped onto the floor and left traces on my toes when I yanked the sandal off. A half-width of paper towel (I remain frugal even under duress) was the first absorbent thing I grabbed and pressed against the cut. Next, I tied a kitchen towel on top of the paper towel and began to hobble toward the bedroom that held the first-aid box.

Youngest son was plugged into his computer in the adjacent dining room and didn’t move. Husband emerged from the hallway with his phone pressed to his ear. “I dropped a knife on my ankle,” I said. He turned back into the hallway. By then, I was pretty well convinced that I could have bled to death in the kitchen, and nobody would have noticed until dinner time. “Hey, what’s for dinner?” Darling son would then post on Facebook and Twitter, “Mom’s dead. That sucks” and go back to GoreCavern 2: the Sickening.

The hubs turned up as I was scrabbling through the plastic bin in search of butterfly bandages. “I tell you I’ve dropped a knife on myself, and you do nothing?” said I.

“I couldn’t hear you.”

“Didn’t the towel around the ankle give you a clue?”

“I just thought you might have sprained it or something.”

Oh, well, of course, a mere sprained ankle on your wife is nothing to HANG UP THE DANG PHONE for.

But he did help find the right bandages and, with a great air of self-importance, applied the butterfly strip over the cut, and a regular bandage crosswise over that. When I sat on the bed, he squashed a pillow under my foot to elevate it. The shock wearing off, the cut stung, and my eyes teared up. I asked for a tissue. He brought it and insisted on drying my tears—by bouncing the wadded tissue on the center of my eyeball. Very Ray Romano.

Naturally, Facebook is the place to analyze such ordeals, and I posted a brief report, with a notice to an EMT friend who once posted a photo of someone’s feet shredded to pulp right down to the tendons and wrote “Boys and girls, this is why we don’t wear flipflops on motorcycles.” Probably because she has answered calls for things like “Go to the drugstore and pick up my prescription,” she rejoiced that we actually took care of the cut ourselves. So I guess that’s all right. And... cut.