The Adventures of Frankenfinger

Ever have one of those days when you just know you should’ve listened to your snooze button and gone back to sleep?

Friday was that day.

To begin, I overslept.  This never makes for a good morning.  After a pretty standard dose of rush-around-yelling-at-everyone-in-the-house-with-feet, I hurried down the stairs much too quickly.

My right foot failed to keep up.

I sort of half-fell half-lurched forward down the last two steps.  Despite the slow motion arms flailing to catch myself, I somehow ended up sitting on my tuchus on the bottom step.

Kidzilla was concerned.

“Mommy, why did you fall down the steps?”

Sigh.  It’s not like I did it on purpose.

And because I am currently living in a semi-hysterical, over-tired, over-emotional state pretty much every day lately, I proceeded to cry.  Now Kidzilla was really concerned.  She quickly – and blessedly – rushed to my side and wiped away my tears.

“Mommy, it’s OK.  I’ll wipe your tears.”

Thank you, Zilla.  Once again, you’ve saved me from myself.

While I sat there being comforted by my daughter, I seriously considered crawling back up the stairs (crawling would be necessary since I was convinced my ankle was broken at this point) and getting back into bed.  Should have.  Didn’t.

Instead, I wrapped my ankle (not broken) in an Ace bandage and headed for the car.  At some point mid-morning I attempted the ridiculously dangerous task of reaching into a cabinet to get something I needed to go about the rest of my morning.

And then it happened.

On the way back out of the cabinet, my finger makes contact with the top edge of the inside of the metal cabinet and…

“Ouch!!!  @$&^!!!”

Great.  I look at my hand and see a pretty nasty – but essentially non-bloody – gash.  I walk to the tissue box and when I look back at my hand,

“Holy *#$@!!!”

There is a slight drip drip of blood on the table.  I grab more tissues and head out the door to go find a Band-Aid.  Now begins more of a dripdripdripdrip of blood, moving across the floor with me like some creepy red-footprinted specter.

I have never had a problem with gore…but apparently I have a problem with my own gore.  So by this point, I’m kind of freaking out and hyperventilating.

I find my way to the in-house nurse’s office.  She moves the tissues and says something really helpful and comforting like, “WHOA!  That’s a lot of blood!  You’re going to need a suture!”

My stomach turned over.

I wanted Fab Hub to come and take me to the ER for my suture.  But Fab Hub is not really OK with anybody’s gore.  Well, let me correct that.  Fab Hub is not really OK with any real human being’s gore.  Crazy zombie gore or slasher movies?  Not a problem.  But real life gore is a deal-breaker.

Rather than get both of us in a gore-incited state, I go for option #2 – the BFF.  BFF is in the same building.  She can escort me and my gore to the ER.  Fab Hub agrees this is probably a better solution.  So off we go – me, BFF, and gore.

By now my finger burns like, well, hell.  We wait a while and are finally ushered into a posh little ER suite teeny glass room.  When the nurse comes to take a look, BFF said “OK…you are NOT going to look at this. OK?”

Not a problem.  But admittedly, it’s kind of hard not to be curious when people are saying things like “WHOA!  That’s a pretty severe laceration!”  Somehow I manage to keep my eyes averted while explaining to the fourth person in under an hour that my day began with a fall down the stairs and now this!

In the middle of this, Super Sister is texting me furiously because when I let her know that I was headed to the ER, I failed to remember to tell her that I was OK – key words for telling a relative you’re headed for an emergency room visit.  I can’t remember how we got her back to calm – probably BFF texted her or called her and explained.

I was pre-occupied wondering if my finger was going to fall off.

Finally, Doctor Guy shows up and decides that my poor finger needs not one, but FOUR sutures.  In the larger scheme of things, I am certain that four sutures are not very many.  But on one finger?  WHOA!  That’s a lot of sutures!

At this point, probably because “sutures” sounds much more dire than “stitches,” I decide to feel woozily and turn pale.  Doctor Guy asks if I am OK.

“Well,” I said.  “Not really.”

It was here that I remembered that I had not yet eaten my breakfast.

The next thing I know, the Nurse procures a lovely Styrofoam cup of juice and hands it to BFF.  I was busy getting stitched up and telling the ninth person who asked that yes, my tetanus shot was current.  I was concentrating on the fact that Doctor Guy just said I’d feel some pressure as he sewed my finger back on my hand.  I think I wondered out loud if the “pressure” he was describing (which was really more like unbelievable hellish burning) would be anything like the “pressure” they claimed I would feel when Zilla was born via C-section.

Nurse: “You mean the kind of pressure where it feels like someone is jumping on your uterus?”

Yes, that’s the one.

I figured it couldn’t be anything like that.  Through my terror, I spoke out again.

“I have been through a horrendous childbirth experience, complete with sutures or staples or some such unholy thing.  Surely I can handle a few little stitches.”

Of course for that one, I was unconscious and therefore unavailable for comment. This time I am fully aware of what’s going down and I am not really having a good time.

In the meantime, Doctor Guy finishes the deed and BFF hands me my juice as she says, “Here, drink your juice,” proving once again that a quote from Steel Magnolias is always appropriate.

I listen carefully to my discharge instructions from Doctor Guy…keep it clean and dry, change the dressing.  I was good right up to the part where Doctor Guy said I might want to consider using a finger condom to keep it dry…

BFF and I cracked up like twelve year old boys.  I tried not to.  I really did.

But it gets just a little bit better…

While my very nice Nurse cleans up the bloody aftermath of the operation, fire alarm bells start to ring.  BFF and I both jump about a foot in the air.

Me and BFF: “What was that???”

Nurse (in a very pleasant tinkle-tinkle of Angels voice): “That was a fire alarm.”

Me and BFF:  “What do we do?  Where do we go?”

Nurse (same voice):  “We stay here.”

And with that she disappeared, sliding the glass door closed behind her.

Fantastic.  There’s a fire and she locked us in the room.

While she was gone, we heard a voice on the PA system say, “Code Red blah blah something unintelligible.  Code Red blah blah something unintelligible.”

Me:  “BFF, quick!  Look up ‘code red’ on my phone and see what it means.”

BFF:  “It means fire.”

Me:  “Aren’t you supposed to leave when there’s a fire?”

BFF:  “Apparently not.”

How absurd.

Even more absurd?  The Rotten Cats surrounding a wayward finger condom like the Macbeth Witches.  They were completely terrified of the thing.  At that point, I decided I would not be wearing one – germs be damned.

Of course, the Rotten Cats’ terror could have stemmed from the fact that I tried to blow one of the condoms up like a balloon and it escaped from my grasp and flew around the room…or maybe from the fact that I chased them around with it for a few minutes.  I guess we’ll never know.

So…now I have four black sutures in my left middle finger which makes it look disturbingly like something straight out of Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory.  Yes, it had to be that finger, right?  So every time someone asks me about it, it looks like I’m giving them the bird.

Which is mildly entertaining…but I just blame it on my evil Frankenfinger.