I want it to be known that I have shown great restraint in waiting until today, Wednesday, Feb. 6, to blog about my husband’s stitches, which happened on Saturday, Jan. 26. More than a week, bitches! I am the best wife ever.
“You’re going to put that in your blog about this, aren’t you?” my husband asked as I was snapping a photo of a poster on the wall in the urgent care. Notice, he didn’t ask if I was going to blog about the accident, only if I was going to include the poster. He knows you can’t slice open your finger seconds after bringing new knives into the house straight from Bed Bath & Beyond without having it written up for all the Just Humor Me folks to enjoy. I’ve shown zen-like patience in waiting 11 whole days to tell anyone who cares that at the exact moment that I was telling my daughter to be really careful with these knives because they’re extremely sharp - I was in the middle of a six- to seven-sentence lecture - in the exact middle of the lecture, I swear - when I was interrupted by my husband saying: “Uh-oh.” While I was describing the knives’ sharpness to my daughter, who probably will never use the knives in her life now, my husband was taking them out of their individual boxes. They were strapped in by those black plastic binders that are found in everything you buy from Home Depot and Toys R Us. In my house, there isn’t a pair of scissors or a knife that can easily cut them, except for, ironically, the knives we had just bought and were trying to free. (It’s kind of the reason we were buying new knives in the first place. Our kitchen knives were so dull, they were safety approved for toddlers. I could ask a preschool class to chop vegetables for me and not even get in trouble with the moms.) Something slipped and one of the new knives sliced an inch-and-a-half long slice in my husband’s right index finger, right on the knuckle. I know. Gross, right? It was deep, too. So we went to the urgent care, which is rife with flu germs, old people with phlegmy coughs, and possible blog topics. “Look at this,” I told my husband as I snapped a picture of the schedule of charges poster on the waiting room wall. “If your wound is more than 2.5 centimeters long, you pay more. I wonder if that means you’d be better off being shot with a small-caliber bullet than getting that long cut on your finger.” I snapped more pictures, of more funny posters and of my husband sitting there holding his finger with a washcloth that was quickly becoming maroon. Also a recipe for southwest stuffed peppers from a magazine I was afraid to steal. “Ha! Look, Dipstick $30,” I read from the poster. “If you get charged $30, you’ll know . . .” He was not amused. In the end he needed six stitches and that cut was a blood geyser during the whole stitching process. I know because I watched. I didn’t take photos of that, though. I was too busy taking notes. And offering helpful advice like “You’re not going to get blood on his jeans, are you?” and “Could you sedate him with that stuff you get when you get your wisdom teeth out? I’m looking for blog topics for March.”