Slice of(f) Life

After my husband and I had a quiet Valentine's Day dinner at the nice restaurant of the tiny town of my small college on the hill, I awoke early this morning and went off to my Friday yoga class. When I returned to the apartment, my husband was up, duly caffeinated and ready to join me in taking the dogs for their walk.

As we started off, my husband suggested that we should take the road less traveled to see where a particular street, which abuts an old cemetery, ended. When it was all said and done, we and the dogs had walked three full miles mostly through lonely country roads of frozen cornfields and snowed-over fields where the only company we met was the birds and the occasional truck speeding by us.

"People don't have much reason to obey speed limits on country roads," my husband observed after I complained that we'd almost been run over by a huge pickup truck. "There's not usually pedestrians on these roads."

True, of course, since there's not a sidewalk to be seen for miles, which makes sense, of course, when you're out in the flat-land boonies of Ohio (I guess).

Once home, the dogs were spent and so were we, and I was hungry so I decided to toast myself some bread from a small loaf of good Italian pan I had bought recently. There was not much left of the loaf and while I successfully cut off one slice, the razor-sharp bread knife came too close to my finger in attempting to cut the second slice and almost lopped off the very top of my left thumb.

I yelled, more because I knew that this was Trouble than because it hurt, and my husband rushed into the kitchen to ascertain the damage. We both agreed that the cut was deep enough that I probably would need stitches. But where? One thing of being in the boonies is that you don't usually have access to the same facilities or quality of care that one gets here in our little city. So I called the department's administrative assistant, who is a great resource and friend, and she suggested that I call the college health center. I did and they said I should come right over, so we did.

Now, on the several occasions when my often-accidented life has required a visit to the emergency room, the wait has been interminable. At the very least, I've spent three to four hours waiting; at the most, more than eight. I was already bracing myself for that kind of day, thinking of when I should decide to cancel class, sure that the health center would refer me to the nearest hospital for stitching. But I was wrong.

One of the many advantages of my small college on the hill, I discovered, is precisely that it has a health center on the premises with a good-humored, experienced doctor who not only saw me 10 minutes after I arrived but was able to put my poor thumbty-dumpty together again.

When I complained that I felt like a fool for having this stupidest of accidents, the doctor said: "Be thankful you're not like the Amish guy I saw recently, who had cut off his thumb with a saw and it was still inside the glove when he came to see me."

Well, when you put it that way... The doctor then told us another story, of another Amish guy who cut several gashes into his fingers with a saw, but worked until the end of the day with the hand wrapped in a towel and then came to see him.

That story, of course, reminded both my husband and I of the time he had the same accident I had just had. Way back when we lived in Puerto Rico, my husband was slicing apples so he could prepare one of his West Virginia dessert cakes for my grandmother, who has always had quite the sweet tooth.

After slicing into his thumb, my stoic husband refused to be taken to the emergency room and assured me that his finger would heal soon. Well, three days later, his thumb was still bleeding. When we visited my grandmother, still formidable at a much younger age than her very frail 98-year-old self today, she commandeered us into taking him to the hospital and actually came with us to make sure she was obeyed.

After spending hours in the emergency room, once the surgeon finally saw my husband, his first question was: "Why did you wait so long to come to the emergency room?" Turns out he had nicked a vein. While I remember that the surgeon suggested he would have likely bled to death over a few weeks, if the finger had not been finally stitched up, my husband disputes this memory. To this day, my husband does remember that episode with a bit of chagrin, since it was one of those extremely rare occasions in which his better judgment was a little off.

My philosophy is that all is well that ends well. His finger healed completely and so will mine. And now we have one more slice of life to tell. Still, from now on, I'm staying away from seemingly innocent bread knives that are actually sharp enough to cut through a slab of beef.