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July 11, 2005
no sense (in two acts)
ACT ONE:
Bad night last night. Woke to hellacious upper GI pain, reminiscent of gall stone pain. [For those among you who are not acquainted with gall stone attacks: count yourself lucky. Having gall stones is like having many many excruciating, looooong heart attacks, which SHOULD end in death, but instead of ending, simply KEEP HURTING.] Heartburn (more appropriately described as heartSTAB or will-you-please-stop-chopping-my heart-with-that-ice-pick-PLEASE) along with symmetric back pain. I propped myself up in the couch and did some deep breathing. Slept intermittently.
Woke this morning with residual burn, not as intense. I took the kids to swim lessons and sat on the pool deck wishing I had NEVER eaten whatever it was that had put me in such a state.
And then I remembered.
Good Sense. The anti-diarrheal. Which had done SUCH magic keeping my waste inside of me that now my waste was crawling back up into my stomach. Or something.
I spent the rest of the day drinking water and nibbling small fibrous snacks, like prunes and raisins.
ACT TWO:
[flashback]
I stand at the counter yesterday afternoon, pre-agony, chopping green onions for a fabulous black bean salsa, the recipe for which I ganked from a friend-of-a-friend at the 4th festivities. [hm. maybe Good Sense + too much salsa = miserable night??] Brian comes in.
B: Do we have any iodine?
Me: Uh, no. Bactine, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Neosporin. What do you need iodine for?
B: You don't wanna know.
Now. He's absolutely right; I don't want to know. Brian is the kind of man who you DON'T want rubbing aloe onto your sunburnt back. His hands are thick, calloused mitts of steele. He is constantly cutting, abrading, puncturing, tearing, etc, them, and rarely bats an eye. When he does come looking for a band-aid, he usually ends up needing stitches. When we lived in VA, he dropped a transmission and engine onto his hand (middle finger, to be exact) and cut it open so wide and deeply that the bone was quite visible. A few years back here in NY, he had a nail and the tips of several fingers peeled off when his hand slipped into a boat engine.
I look to his hands, and neither is wrapped in his T shirt or some other random blood catching medium, and I relax.
Me: What do you need it for?
B: It's kinda gross.
Me: [Thinking that he's due for a trip to the emergency room, since he hasn't been in a year or so, and he MUST MISS GOING or something] Just TELL ME.
He peels off the sock of his left foot to reveal a triangular puncture, about a centimeter wide, on the instep. He wiggles his toe: I see (thankfully operable) connective tissue contract and release.
The room spins.
Me: Uuuuuuuh. How'd you do that?
After much cajoling, he describes the scene: He had been working on the upstairs remodel, prepping a doorway to hang a door. The existing doorways upstairs are all crooked and are strangely configured (no conventional door measurements in 1892, apparently). We're special ordering most of them, but this particular doorway was CLOSE, so he was up there with the SAWZALL, shaving a 100-year-old rough cut 2 by 4 to make a standard door fit. He's cutting in a downward motion, ostensibly AWAY from his body. And near the end, the sawzall unexpectedly, swiftly, cuts out from the 2 by 4 and chops right into the top of his shoe. edited to add: "10-inch blade, still running," Brian reminds me, after making sure I didn't make him sound like an inbred redneck.
Ouch.
So, he dresses his wound (I can't, I'm swooning) and returns to finish hanging the door. And then, several hours later, he decides he's going to get stitched because it won't quit oozing blood and soaking many many gauze pads.
He won't let me take a picture of it for the blog, I don't think. Maybe when he's sleeping...
Posted by mryonker at July 11, 2005 10:44 PM