It’s the middle of the day and I am standing in Molly’s driveway with my hand resting palm up on the tailgate of her mobile vet office a.k.a pickup truck. Because there’s a pandemic raging around us and we are decidedly inside the 6-foot distancing zone, we are both fully masked. I turn away, pull down my mask, take a couple of swigs of liquid courage and reposition my mask. Molly goes to work with alcohol and gauze, cleaning around the stitches on my finger while I chatter nervously in an attempt to be brave. Molly and her husband have been reading the Harry Potter series to their daughter who is performing a bit of magic using a beaver-gnawed stick as a wand. The first black flies of the season sluggishly flop about near our eyeballs.
Molly asks for the story of how I sliced my finger open ten days ago, but I deflect: Can I tell you after? I need to get in my happy place. I avert my eyes from the doctoring that’s happening on the left side of my body and focus instead on the little brook trickling down from the ledge above. It’s all oak trees and buds, daffodils and goats, a cute kid and big fluffy dogs. Even so, this happy place is little match for the white hot zingers of scab disturbance and skin stretching and pissed off inflamed tissue. Molly is a pro but this hurts. She works swiftly, undeterred by my guttural lamenting. She apologizes and claims that she has “not a wisp of sadism” and says something about how her bovine and equine clients generally aren’t able to tell her when she’s hurting them. Well, except for when they kick me. I know it makes sense to say something now about how kicking her holds some appeal in this moment, but it actually never crosses my mind. Molly is a very good soul doing me a huge favor.
I did try to do this myself. Magnifying glass between my knees, tweezers between thumb and forefinger of my injured hand, nail clippers in the other. I really want to be that tough, so badass that I could Macgyver a self suture removal. But, the sensation of the stitch sliding through my skin completely grosses me out. Plus, when I peer at it under a magnifying glass I get a nauseatingly up close look at all the lumpy scar tissue and scabs. When Tom arrives home from work, I ask him to do it, figuring that while it’s not quite as ninja as doing it myself, it’s decidedly better than having to tell my primary care physician that a single-minded pursuit of cheese led to eight stitches in my finger. Tom is game of course — actually, a little too game, if you ask me. The glee on his face and the sparkle in his eyes gives me pause. We need better tools, I decide. We must know someone with those special curved scissors. And because Molly is fearless and ten times more badass than I could ever hope to be, she offered to just take care of it. Which is how I end up in her driveway with my big dumb hand getting un-sutured on the tailgate of her pickup truck.
When the sutures are out Molly reminds me I owe her the story of how it happened in the first place. She’s right. I do owe her, but it’s not a great story. It highlights some of my worst traits and is basically the trifecta of bad decision-making, being a dork, and a weakness for cheddar. I am in the kitchen, using a very sharp knife to laterally wiggle apart some frozen slices of cheese. For the record, even as I’m doing it, I am fully aware that it’s a terrible idea. It has BAD IDEA flashing in neon lights all around it. Could I just be patient and wait a little while for the cheese to soften? Or at the very least use a butter knife? Yes I could. But do I? No I do not. I think I can do it. I think I’m THAT good. I can be careful with the really sharp knife. I can control things. I am living in the wackadoodle reality of the covid pandemic but this, THIS, I can control. How is it that I fail to be properly deterred by the reckless risk in this moment? Why do I insist on believing I can control things when I can’t? Why so stubborn and impatient? And why must dairy always be at the center of my undoing?
The next few moments go exactly as you might think: the top few slices break free and the knife slides through the gap, meeting the ring finger on my left hand. I do what anyone does when they cut themselves during food prep: I put down the knife, go to the sink, turn on the water, and shove my hand under it. Then, I take a deep breath and hope with all my might that it’s not that bad. I see an open flap of skin and … the white sheath of tendon.
Shit.
Since this story begins with “I was home alone” I quickly wrap my hand in paper towels, grab my keys, and drive myself to Porter with my left hand above my head singing a manic little ditty on endless loop that goes something like you’re okay, don’t pass out, you’re okay, don’t pass out, just keep driving, don’t pass out, just drive, and drive, cause driving is good and passing out, not so good... As luck would have it, I manage to remain conscious for the entire journey which is supremely useful when you’re behind the wheel. Yes, the ER doc assures me, it’s good you came in, you definitely need stitches. And that’s a real nice filet job you did there.
The emergency room is not a place you want to burden with your dumb cheese obsessed presence during a global health crisis, especially when you’re not currently dying from an illness related to said pandemic. Now you’re just an idiot using up already taxed resources and distracting exhausted medical personnel from much bigger problems. And, in the case of my particularly shitty timing, getting in the way of the staff practicing a mass casualty drill.
On the upside, the medical team has chosen this particular moment in time to do the drill because they are remarkably un-busy. Turns out Addison County is doing a really good job at sheltering in place: on the day I visit, there are no known cases of the covid on site. Would have been nice if they had led with that — seeing folks scurrying around in head to toe hazmat treating dozens of urgent cases (none of them real, I find out later) does wonders for my already soaring anxiety upon arrival. Then again, who am I to judge anyone’s decision-making: I can’t even wait a few minutes for cheddar to come to room temperature. Everyone knows cheddar is better at room temperature. The shame of it all stings worse than the wound.