Harley knocked over a mirror last night. It was a $10 Wal-Mart mirror, so it wasn’t a big deal. I cracked open my new box of generic trash bags1 and collected the glass shards.
When I moved to throw out the trash bag, I felt a sharp pain in my thigh – a glass shard had cut through the trash bag, through my shorts, and stabbed into my thigh.
I pulled up the leg of my shorts just in time to see the start of Bloodfest 2009. I grabbed a paper towel, pressed on the cut, and then instant messaged Gibs to see if he could drive me to the hospital.
But Gibs was at work. Drats!
The bleeding stopped after about five minutes, so I cleaned and bandaged the cut. My grand plans of laundry and vacuuming were ruined. Double-drats.
I then hobbled outside to let the dog pee. The stairs were a chore, and I ended up hopping down the outside stairs of my apartment building to the amusement of the Tibetan children hanging out across the street.
The “walk” was mercifully short. Harley had his second heartworm shot earlier that day. Harley was so sore from the shot that he squatted in the grass in front of the apartment building, peed, and then gave me a look like “let’s go inside, fool.”
Once inside, I called madre.
My mother has been in the hospital for the past few days watching over her boyfriend. Her boyfriend saw a doctor because he felt ill, and the doctor told him that he had dangerously low levels of iron and that he had to be hospitalized.
When I called my mother, her boyfriend had just undergone his third blood transfusion.
I told her what happened to my leg and asked her if I should go to the ER. The answer?
Mom: “No. Don’t you dare! There’s nothing they can do for you. You are just going to sit there for hours and then they’ll just bandage it, and it’s going to cost a lot of unnecessary time and money.”
Well fine.
I spent the rest of the night reading in bed.
This morning I took Harley back to the animal hospital for his third heartworm shot. I then dropped Harley off at home, and went to school.
The law school is on the West side of the Mississippi. The student hospital is on the East side of the river. I parked at the ramp by the law school, because I pay an outrageous amount of money to park there, and because I thought I could take a shuttle to the other side of campus.
I didn’t remember that the shuttles don’t run during the summer until I parked my car.
So I had to hobble across the Washington Avenue bridge to get to the student clinic. Walking across the bridge at half-speed was an odd mix of enjoying the beauty2 of Minnesota during summer, avoiding bikers, and the occasional shoot of pain from a mis-step.
At the hospital I saw two nurses before I saw a doctor. Each nurse asked me if I had allergies and when my last tetanus shot was. I was then told that I had waited too long to come in, and that the hospital didn’t stitch wounds that were over 12 hours old.
When I saw the doctor, he asked me when my last tetanus shot was and then told me that he couldn’t stitch the wound.
Doctor: “Yeah, after 12 hours we don’t stitch wounds because they’ll probably get infected. So what we are going to do is get you some Steri-Strips.
Me: “Steri-Strips! My favorite... so you say the blood went to the tissue around the cut?”
Doctor: “Yeah, you got major swelling around there too.”
Me: “How long am I going to be hobbling around?”
Doctor: “At least two weeks! Pain and swelling for at least two weeks! Take an Advil. It will rock your world.”
Dandy.
I actually scoffed at the idea of pain medicine – I didn’t even take pain medicine for the bullet wound. It’s not because I fancy myself Rambo, but because pain medicine knocks me out, and I can’t be drugged up the week before summer school finals.
1 The reason why I mention that the trash bags are generic is because this would NEVER have happened if I had bought my usual heavy-duty “you can use this to hide a body” trash bags.
2 It’s a really long bridge over the river, so the view is a-mazing.
