Feeling: wounded
Listening to: Coldplay - Swallowed in the Sea
Reading/Watching: The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

Okay, so who wants the latest story of how much of a dumbass I am?

A summary: I nearly impaled my hand. Whee.

I had an appointment with the church office where mon coeur and I want to be married, to pay a deposit on their reception space (Yay April 29th! Reception officially reserved!). As a result, I skipped lunch and went to sign papers and fork over an extremely painful check to hold the reservation for us ($750 is never an expense Katie's bank account enjoys).

When I finished up around 3, I went home and started desperately scavenging for food, having eaten breakfast six or seven hours earlier. Chatting busily with Nimsay, I unearthed a hamburger bun, some lettuce, and a stack of frozen patties.

I tried to separate the top hamburger patty with a spatula, then with a butter knife, and finally Nimsay said that her aides use a steak knife to get the job done. So I had the meat tower sitting in the sink, prying under the top patty with one of our uber-special-never-have-to-be-sharpened steak knives, bracing the pile with my left hand.

Meat slipped. Fill in the blanks. All those rules about "don't cut toward yourself"? Yeah, they officially apply now.

Except my version of the rule is, "Don't put extreme force behind the sharpest point of a steak knife when your other hand is within four inches of it, dumbass."

So I was watching my hand bleed (with considerable surprise) for a couple seconds, marveling at how I'd never seen so much come out of me, especially in a projectile manner, when I had the bright idea to put some pressure on it and sit down before I fainted. My ears were already feeling full of flies.

I squeezed a towel tightly around my palm, and asked Nimsay to call mon coeur, since I knew he'd just gotten out of work, and could drive me to the hospital (after that whole nightmare with the ambulance drivers who dumped me in a 12-hour-wait at the county hospital and billed me $400, I don't exactly love ambulances).

So Nimsay called him, left a message on his voice mail when he didn't pick up ("he's probably driving, and didn't hear it," I said, and remembered to hold my hand higher than my heart), and then called her mother, who is a doctor.

Her mother, of course, being a mother, said we needed to go to the emergency room immediately, that I might get an infection from the frozen meat, that I'd need stitches, that I might have nerve damage, since my pinkie finger was tingling oddly (I still think it was because of the sudden loss of blood).

I moved to lie down on the couch and pressed my toweled hand to the top of my head, testing to see if I could bend and feel my fingers. I could. It seemed like the bleeding was stopping, because the towel was barely spotted when I checked.

That's when my retarded housekeeping instincts kicked in, and I thought that I should clean up the kitchen, which was a horrible mess. I got up, and just barely had time to put the rest of the hamburger patties back in the freezer before I began to feel woozy again, so I listened to Nimsay's protests and lay back down.

Nimsay's aid came in for her four o' clock appointment, and started asking questions in Spanish, which I can halfway comprehend these days. I still can't answer, though, so I did my best with gestures, and let Nimsay do the talking. Then the aid went to the kitchen, and said something about "Dios! mucho sangre" (yep, I am such a genius for decoding that one) and turned off the stove, which was still preheating the saucepan I'd set out to cook my burger.

Finally, when all the drama was over and I'd decided I didn't need to go to the hospital, mon coeur arrived. I peeled off the towel and showed him how the bleeding had stopped, demonstrated that I could move my fingers.

The cut was only a half-inch wide, which didn't look all that terrible, until you consider how deep the knife had to go to make a half-inch perforation. Mon coeur actually pulled out our tape measure and checked against the width of the knife, and estimated it was about an inch and a quarter deep (that's three centimeters for you metric folks). Just hearing that made me feel a little grayish again. I wasn't even sure my palm was an inch and a quarter deep (but then, my study of anatomy ended with ninth-grade bio).

So anyway, he cleaned out the sink, and wiped the scariness off the counter, and the front of the cabinets, and the floor, and we went to the pharmacy to buy some bandages. It wasn't until we were in the check-out counter and the cashier gave me an odd look that I realized I probably should have changed out of my blood-spotted shirt and pants. I was scaring the locals.

So now my hand is disinfected (mon coeur was not popular with me when he explained he had to re-open the cut to clean it), gauzed, and wrapped up in that cool brown cloth-tape that sticks to itself. I can bend it, and use it for holding or opening stuff (slowly), but twice now I've been stupid enough to forget and lean my weight on my hands, and that is unpleasant.

I just keep thinking about how I said I could do without health insurance (coverage on my parents' plan ends this month) until we got married, and I was on my husband's. Famous last words, much?

I've decided, however, that this is going to be one of those Newly Proclaimed Adulthood stories that, like my first drink or my first time, Mom & Dad should not know about. "Baby's First Stab Wound" is not a tale for the parents to enjoy over Thanksgiving dinner. It's like they say, once your parents stop protecting you, you start protecting them.

Plus, my dad would probably call me an idiot. And he wouldn't be wrong.

Edited to add: Although Dad just called me on his cell phone, announcing that he's found the song he wants for our Father of the Bride dance. He bought the CD, and played it on his car speakers into the cell phone. I am partially deafened, and could barely make out the words, but I got a little teary. He got a little teary. We are just a pair of weepy-girls.

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