I Don't Do Anything Halfway
Oct. 28th, 2009 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspritePlan for tonight: finish making desserts for Crown Tourney - 3 more apple pies, another 70 shortbread cookies, and currant cake.
What really happened tonight: Spent 2 1/2 hours in emergency room getting my head sewn back together after trying to reenact the Birth of Athena using my own forehead and a particularly wicked-looking barbecue tool with a disturbingly sharp metal churchkey on the end.
I had started putting together the base ingredients for the currant cake, and was bending down to pick up an ingredient from the pantry floor. I didn't notice the Evil Barbecue Spatula Of Doom; it's been on the same shelf for two years. It noticed me, though, and I whacked my noggin on it but good.
And I figured that was it. Just a whack. I sat on the pantry floor, whining and cursing my stupidity and clutching my forehead, and my sainted husband came over to see what was wrong. "Just a bump," I said. "I'm being a baby."
"You're bleeding," he replied, and handed me a paper towel. And within a minute, I noticed that the blood had soaked through the paper towel and was running down my arms. A quick glance in the bathroom mirror showed me a gaping cut about as long as my thumb, and blood clotting in my eyebrow, and we decided that maybe I needed to go to the emergency room.
By the time we got there, I had bled through all of our gauze and several wads of paper towels. The triage nurse in the ER tried to reassure me that it couldn't be as bad as I had assumed, and that all scalp wounds bleed. Not for half an hour, I told her. You're disrupting the clot, she told me. I sighed and pressed harder.
Half an hour later, an assistant came to bandage it for me, so I could stop pressing. More gauze, wrapped and strapped around my head until I couldn't see through the layers over my eyes. That took almost 15 minutes to bleed through.
After another half hour, I was shuffled into a bed and a nurse came to look at the wound. When she started to take the bandages off, I warned her that it would be messy. She reassured me that there was no way it would still be bleeding. I told her it was, and she didn't quite scoff. Then she peeled the bandage back, peeked, and slammed it back down. "You've severed an artery."
It was awesome. There was spurting. I hope I never again have to experience the sensation of my own blood pooling in my ear as a physician's assistant desperately injects my head with lidocaine so she can try to find the responsible vessel and tie it closed.
Two and a half hours, one arterial ligation, nine stitches, and a lump the size of a goose egg later, and I am home. Somewhat woozy and giddy from shock and blood loss, and with what I hope is a rakish and piratical (not hideous and Frankensteinian) wound along my hairline above my left eye, and with orders to avoid strenuous physical activity for the next few days, but otherwise none the worse for wear.
Only me. Only I could manage to sever an artery in my forehead while baking a cake.
I'm just special that way.
What really happened tonight: Spent 2 1/2 hours in emergency room getting my head sewn back together after trying to reenact the Birth of Athena using my own forehead and a particularly wicked-looking barbecue tool with a disturbingly sharp metal churchkey on the end.
I had started putting together the base ingredients for the currant cake, and was bending down to pick up an ingredient from the pantry floor. I didn't notice the Evil Barbecue Spatula Of Doom; it's been on the same shelf for two years. It noticed me, though, and I whacked my noggin on it but good.
And I figured that was it. Just a whack. I sat on the pantry floor, whining and cursing my stupidity and clutching my forehead, and my sainted husband came over to see what was wrong. "Just a bump," I said. "I'm being a baby."
"You're bleeding," he replied, and handed me a paper towel. And within a minute, I noticed that the blood had soaked through the paper towel and was running down my arms. A quick glance in the bathroom mirror showed me a gaping cut about as long as my thumb, and blood clotting in my eyebrow, and we decided that maybe I needed to go to the emergency room.
By the time we got there, I had bled through all of our gauze and several wads of paper towels. The triage nurse in the ER tried to reassure me that it couldn't be as bad as I had assumed, and that all scalp wounds bleed. Not for half an hour, I told her. You're disrupting the clot, she told me. I sighed and pressed harder.
Half an hour later, an assistant came to bandage it for me, so I could stop pressing. More gauze, wrapped and strapped around my head until I couldn't see through the layers over my eyes. That took almost 15 minutes to bleed through.
After another half hour, I was shuffled into a bed and a nurse came to look at the wound. When she started to take the bandages off, I warned her that it would be messy. She reassured me that there was no way it would still be bleeding. I told her it was, and she didn't quite scoff. Then she peeled the bandage back, peeked, and slammed it back down. "You've severed an artery."
It was awesome. There was spurting. I hope I never again have to experience the sensation of my own blood pooling in my ear as a physician's assistant desperately injects my head with lidocaine so she can try to find the responsible vessel and tie it closed.
Two and a half hours, one arterial ligation, nine stitches, and a lump the size of a goose egg later, and I am home. Somewhat woozy and giddy from shock and blood loss, and with what I hope is a rakish and piratical (not hideous and Frankensteinian) wound along my hairline above my left eye, and with orders to avoid strenuous physical activity for the next few days, but otherwise none the worse for wear.
Only me. Only I could manage to sever an artery in my forehead while baking a cake.
I'm just special that way.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-10-29 01:49 am (UTC)That's it....
no subject
Date: 2009-10-29 02:25 am (UTC)The closest I can come to this is the gash in my leg from
helping with dinner when I was five - but that was just
bringing up a bottle of Sprite (tm) from the basement when
my jackass brother decided he had to have the same bottle
after I'd already picked it up...
no subject
Date: 2009-10-29 03:59 am (UTC)