Clumsy Katya: Part Two

So we pulled in the parking lot at St. Mary's. Xon helped me put a jacket on (even though it's still 1000 degrees here) so everyone wouldn't see the hole in my t-shirt. I walked up to the registration desk, holding my little hand in a yellow washcloth. But before I could say, "I had an accident," the man at the desk said, "You need to be seen."

Yep.

So we went over to the nurses' station, but the nurse on duty was taking someone's blood pressure, so she wouldn't look up. There was a card sitting at the window, so Xon went ahead and filled it out, telling them just what our emergency was. "Cut her finger off," he wrote. --He didn't want to be a jerk like you see in the movies, but it didn't take too long for us to decide that we were more important than the man getting his blood pressure taken. I told Xon to just say, "Excuse me," so he did, and the nurse looked up and said, "Oh, you're bleeding."

Yep.

She let me come in the examining room after that. Xon showed her the tip of my finger in the bag of ice, and she said, "Oh, they won't be able to sew that back on!" --I asked her if she could please just tell me they could so I would feel better right then. She laughed. --I was serious.

She had me put my hand over the sink so she could bandage me up. I didn't look, but she said, "Oh! You did good!" --Now really, does anyone ever want to get a compliment on how well they chopped their finger off? Really?

I started to get woozy, so she made me take my jacket off (thus seeing the hole in my t-shirt). I sat down in a chair and told her I thought I was going to throw up. She gave me a bucket, and I did. Cheese quesadillas. Yum... --After that I felt MUCH better, though my finger was throbbing something awful. She took us to "the quiet room," (a dark room with a couch and a phone) and told us to wait. There we called my parents, my sis, Charles and Wendy, Bly, and Xon's dad. (Afterall, the last thing he had heard was Xon telling him he had to hang up because I had cut my finger off.) Dawn and Erich started telling jokes, and I told Dawn she needed to feel really guilty since I had been working on something for HER son.

An ambulence brought a severe case in, so the nurse said I had to wait. I was very thankful I was not the severe case. I spent the next hour praying that everything would turn out ok and thanking God that it was not my right hand and that I hadn't cut through the nail or gotten down to the bone. Really, if I had to cut part of my finger off, I did it just right. So I guess the sarcastic nurse was right afterall.

In the meantime, Charles and Wendy were nice enough to come get our groceries out of the car and take them home so they wouldn't spoil. I asked them to please not take them to our house, because there was blood all over. They sat and talked to us for a minute. Wendy commented that she really wanted to look in the bag with my fingertip. I laughed and said she could look, but I didn't want to see it. Poor Xon had to pick that thing off the floor and bring it with us. Yuck! Wendy decided she better not look at it. :-) --She was thoughtful enough to ask if they had given me anything for the pain, which meant a lot to me that she would think of that. But alas, they had not given me anything...

Charles and Wendy left, and Xon and I waited. The nurse came back in and said it would be two hours in the ER, so she was sending me over to Fast Track, which is sort of a step below the ER. A WONDERFUL nurse named Laura gave me some pain medicine and a Sprite. They put some cauterizing cream on my finger, which burned like fire, bandaged it up with a splint, and told me to see a plastic surgeon in the next couple of days. And thus, my trip to the ER was over. It only took about two hours, which flew by!

After that, we went to the pharmacy to fill my prescription, got some gauze, etc., and it was off to bed. I propped my arm up on a box, and "slept" with it vertically in the air all night. We had told Wendy that I probably wouldn't be at work the next day. She understood.

Hold your breath! There will be more tomorrow!