Life

My High-Risk Lifestyle Landed Me in the Emergency Room

The ER doctor couldn’t believe this one

I flipped off everyone I saw as I walked into the Emergency Room last night.

“I’m not trying to give you the middle finger,” I apologized. “It’s injured.”

A piece of wood was firmly lodged beneath the nail of my right middle finger. I cut back the nail and dug at the wood with a needle, and my husband tried to pull it out with tweezers. No go.

It didn’t look that bad, but man did it ever hurt. I could feel my pulse throb painfully under the nail with every heartbeat.

Naturally, this happened at the exact time the prompt care closed, so I had to choose to endure pain all night or pay for an ER visit. That I, the biggest cheapskate of all time, chose to hit the ER tells you how much more painful this was than you’d think.

Here’s how it happened.

My husband and I arranged and rearranged some very rough lumber on the driveway, considering various configurations for the pergola we are going to build. But that isn’t how I got the splinter.

Next, I used a saw to cut down a couple of saplings growing in the fence line and used a lopper to take down a few smaller ones. I had to carefully work my way around a pile of lumber to access them, and my husband criticized me for it.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he said. But I didn’t.

Nope. It was close to bedtime when I decided one of my dogs needed a fresh blanket. I put the previous one in the laundry and shook out a fresh blanket over her dog bed so it would unfold and land nicely in place.

On the downward flick, my finger caught the edge of the woodwork around the window, and by some crazy chance, I drove the sliver deep into my finger.

My husband heard my yelp from across the house.

This is irony, by the way.

If you happened to read the piece Sean Kernan wrote about irony and want one more example, here you go. Hopefully, Sean agrees with my assessment and we don’t have a fight over this. My punching hand is out of commission.

It’s ironic because I didn’t get a splinter from any of the activities I did outside that would seem to be high-splinter-risk activities but did get one from putting a damned blanket over a dog bed.

After the local anesthetic kicked in, I could see the humor in it. The doctor had to slice open my fingernail to extract the splinter.

‘This is what I get for my high-risk lifestyle,’ I told my husband.

He said I’m not allowed around any more woodwork, which is a literal impossibility in a Victorian chock-full of woodwork. There must be 50 windows in this house, all of them surrounded by killer splinter sources. All of them are out to get me.

I wish I’d watched.

I usually do watch my own surgeries, including my cesarean and the time they had to peel the nail from my little finger to stitch the nail bed. That followed an unfortunate interaction with a giant pumpkin.

The knife slipped and I cut my little finger through the nail to the bone. That was a cool one to see. (I now buy canned pumpkin.)

After my gallbladder removal, I developed a hernia at one of the incisions. I insisted on being awake and unsedated for the repair — a first for that medical team — and I was annoyed that they wouldn’t let me watch it. I had to settle for a play-by-play.

I’m a klutz.

I am clumsy and I know it, so when I’m doing something potentially dangerous, like using a saw, I am extremely careful.

It’s when I’m doing something like changing the dog’s bedding that I put my guard down and get hurt.

That was my mistake, of course. For uncoordinated people like me, everything is high-risk.

I plan to change the sheets on my bed today. I hope I survive.

If you want to read an update on this splinter fiasco, feast on this:

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a copywriter, proofreader and editor in central Illinois. Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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