More Weirdness

I’m getting ready to close down my old blog, because I like having my own site, where people can find me without having to pay. If you want to pay, I’m not going to object, and you can just Paypal me (LOL), but I’m tired of the limited readership on the old blog and see no reason to continue to pay for the privilege of blogging where only people who want to pay can read.

So I was looking through some of my old posts there, and I came across this one, which fit in so well with yesterday’s post that I just had to move it over here. (With appropriate editing, of course.) It’s just proof of my assertion that if there is a completely bizarre and impossible way to injure yourself, I’m going to manage it.

I was eating dinner with the kids at a local chain restaurant in July 2008. Dinner was nearly finished, and we’d enjoyed it immensely. As the waiter was clearing the dishes and asking if we wanted dessert, a knife fell off of a plate, bounced off of my glass and fell onto the floor. The waiter was horrified and apologized profusely. I said it was okay. And we both assumed that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

As the kids and I sat finishing the last bits of our meal, I drank the last of the San Pellegrino in my glass. And my mouth suddenly started to sting and there were sharp, gritty things in it. My son ran to the bathroom and got me some paper towels, and I spit out a mouthful of glass shards. There were several pieces stuck in the roof of my mouth, and I had to work them free and spit them out, too. And spent the next ten minutes spitting blood into paper towels.

Then I spent several minutes in the bathroom washing off my shirt where blood spilled out onto it when I opened my mouth the first time to spit out the glass.

So of course I looked at the water glass when I returned to the table, and it was cracked top to bottom and crushed at the spot where the knife apparently hit it. My tongue and the roof of my mouth were badly cut up, and I was really frightened that I might have swallowed some of the glass without knowing it. I felt really stupid. Who doesn’t check a glass for damage when it gets banged by something — especially something metal?

I sent my son to ask the hostess to ask the manager to come to our table, and I told him what had happened. I told him I wasn’t mad, that it was just a freak accident, and that probably nothing further would come of it, but that I wanted him to know what had happened. I said I was scared I might have swallowed some of the glass. He was kind of nonchalant and noncommital about it. I mean, he was polite and apologetic, but he didn’t seem particularly concerned.

And then he happened to glance down and see the paper towels on the table. He looked like he’d had an electric shock. He asked if that was blood on them. When I said it was, that kind of changed his whole attitude. He filled out an incident report and said his insurance company would be contacting me. He called me at home later to tell me the insurance claim number and to tell me he was had reversed the meal charge on my credit card. I didn’t really expect a refund on the meal or anything … mainly I just wanted him to know what happened and warn him that there was broken glass on the table and in the glass itself. And a tiny part of me wanted some backup in case I ended up in hospital with glass shards in my tum.

Tags: blogging, customer service, Family Life, injury, pain, scars, True Stories