The Stupid Talent Strikes Again

Back in December, I wrote about my talent of getting injured in the most ridiculous ways — while engaged in perfectly innocuous, normally safe activities. Well, the stupid talent has struck again: I fell last night and hurt my left hand badly.

I had come home from eating dinner at Las Tortugas Deli Mexicana, and was listening to the weather forecast on channel 13 — so it was about 21:30 or so. Rain was in the picture for Saturday, starting by noon. I had some stuff in the backyard that was in cardboard boxes, so I thought, I’ll just go out and bring that into the house so it doesn’t get rained on if I sleep in. It wasn’t particularly valuable stuff, just some boards I’d had cut down to practise breaking.

Yeah, I guess I should mention that I’ve been breaking boards (karate fun!)  for the past week or so, and having a blast doing it. And not a single injury sustained … not even a bruise. Not even when I tried to break two boards at once and failed. I thought I might have got a bruise from that, but it failed to materialize. So I’ve broken almost two dozen boards without injury in the past week …. anyway ….

I’d stacked the boards into a couple of boxes to make them easier to move from the car to the karate pit in the backyard. So it wasn’t like I was trying to carry shifting piles or anything. I lifted a box with my hands cupped around the bottom, and started to head in the back door. That’s when it happened.

I should also mention that my back porch-light is not working, and I haven’t yet figured out why. So it was dark in the backyard. But I had grabbed my son’s spelunking headlamp, so I wasn’t working totally in the dark. The headlamp is LED, so it’s pretty bright and casts a wide glow; I could see what I was doing quite well.

I stepped up onto the back walk, tripped over a brick that had been left lying on the walk, and fell. Hard. Still gripping the box. It happened so fast, and so unexpectedly, that I didn’t even have time to drop the box or try to break my fall the way my sensei has been teaching me. I just fell.  Face-first. And because I was still holding the box with my fingers wrapped round the bottom edge, the last three fingers of my left hand took the majority of the force of the fall.

When I’ve got my breath, I look up. All I can see in the glare of the headlamp is the concrete corner of the back stoop. It is one-half inch from my right eye. I lie back down for a moment and quietly freak out a little bit — Oh, God, thank you that I did not slam my eye socket into that corner! Then I get up and look at the damage to my hand. I seem to have scraped the middle knuckles of my last three fingers, but they aren’t  bleeding. (Yet.) I figure I’ll get the stuff inside and then clean up my hand and slap on a couple of sticking-plasters. I take the box inside and set it down. Then I head back out for the second box.

I’m reaching for  the second box to pick it up when I hear it. DRIP! I aim the headlamp down at the box. There are several huge drops of blood spattered in the box. I look at my hand. It’s bleeding now! With a vengeance.  And those are not mere scrapes on those knuckles … they are gouges. So I grab the box — I’m already there, after all — and head back inside. I grab the first thing I see — the dishtowel — to wrap my hand in while I figure out what to do. First things, first — I lock the back door and arm the alarm.

Then I decided that the first thing to do is try to clean my hand so that I can assess the damage. I grab a  bowl and run tepid water in it — I already know that the backs of my knuckles are shredded, and I’m not up for the pain of running water over that. When I get them rinsed, I look at them. The middle finger is barely scraped. Good. The ring finger has a nasty, deep wound, but it’s fairly small. Okay.

OMG, is that my pinky finger? It’s already swollen up bigger than my thumb, solid purple, and bleeding profusely. That looks bad. Is it broken? I flex my fingers, and then try to make a fist. I manage it, so the bones don’t seem to be broken, but the pain is incredible. And the bleeding gets worse.

I call my sister-in-law. Thank God for this amazing woman who is married to my brother. She’s a doctor. And she is one of the calmest people I have ever met. Nothing fazes her — which is, I suppose, a good character quality for a doctor to have. I don’t remember what I said to her …. I’m fairly calm in a crisis, and blood doesn’t bother me — unless it’s mine. Then I’m apt to get a bit flustered.

But she listened to me describe what happened, told me that the only advantage to going to the ER — because, of course, all of the urgent care places are closed at 2200 on Friday night — is that they can X-ray and confirm if it’s broken. And then they will splint it and wrap it and send me home. So she tells me that it would be just as good to splint and bandage it, take an anti-inflammatory, and apply an ice pack.

(Which is fine with me. On Friday night, the ER is full of really strange people, and I figure that “scraped knuckles” will get me four hours minimum wait among the weirdos, and probably a sleepy intern to bandage me up. No thanks. I’m a dab hand at splinting and bandaging, thanks to years of Red Cross training and instructing. And while my stuff always looks better on others than it does on me, I’m not worried about looks here.)

So, after a restless night’s sleep, here I sit. Typing with one hand plus an index finger (it’s taken me almost two hours to get this typed), and wondering what the heck I’m going to do today, since cleaning house, karate practise, board-breaking, writing (since I’m a lefty, even longhand is out), hooking a rug, and most exercise are all impossible. I can’t even grip the controller well enough to play on the Playstation. Or hold a book well enough to read. I think I’m going to try ironing, folding clothes, and filing papers. I might be able to manage those without my dominant hand. We’ll see.

And LifeBlood just called to see if I could donate. I was SO tempted to say, “I gave last night, in the backyard.” But I didn’t.

Tags: challenges, Family Life, humour, pain, True Stories