advances in medicine
So what happens when you are in a hurry and you neglect to properly close your very, very sharp Felco pruners and then, in a fit of whimsy, tuck a fourteen pound dog under one arm while you're carrying the pruners, a half dozen freshly cut flowers, and an empty yoghurt container in the other hand?
Yes, that is what happens. The pruners decide to go to work on your flesh. You drop the dog and everything else while blood spurts.
It really wasn't as bad as it looked at first glance. Fingers bleed a lot. Lots of blood vessels. Those big drops of blood that led from the front garden into the kitchen? Nothing to worry about. Three hours later, looking into a trash can filled with bloody paper towels? Still no need to go overboard. People are way too read to rush off to the emergency room these days. My father, who cut himself on knives in the restaurant kitchen on a regular basis, would scoff. Scoff, I say, at the paltry nature of this ... minor inconvenience.
And see, it did stop bleeding. Finally, it stopped bleeding, and when I got up in the middle of the night there was no lake of blood. No soaked sheets. A bandaid doesn't hold very much blood, you know. It's no big deal to have to change a bandaid.
Fast forward to a conversation with my doctor, who I happen to like a lot. We talk about books and kids and all kinds of stuff. It's perfectly natural for me to stick my finger in her face and say, hey! Would a butterfly bandage work on this? And, do you happen to have one lying around?
Did she get upset? No. She looked at my finger calmly. She turned on another light to look at it some more. Did she yell at me about going to the emergency room? Speak of dire consequences, blood poisoning, necrotizing fasciitis? No. She whipped a tiny tube of Super Glue out of her pocket, grabbed my finger, and glued it shut.
Okay, so first she asked me how I had cleaned it out. But even as she was asking, the tiny glistening drop of Super Glue was hanging over my rent flesh.
And it worked. I can type, I can cook, I can do anything I need to do. No blood, no pain. In fact, it took google less than a second to assure me that it wasn't only my good doctor who is using Super Glue to close wounds. Apparently (hold on tight, girls) midwives are using it to close tears in the perineum.
Someplace, somehow, I've got to fit this into a storyline.