What I did on My Summer Vacation

[strange_aeons]

I was in the kitchen with my roommate and the puppy, standing in almost the same place I stood the other day when I came perilously close to uttering the phrase 'editing my steak'. I was cutting chicken wings up into their compontent parts — for the puppy, who we're hoping will be able to eat bits of chicken wing on a regular basis now, since he seems to have handled the bits of lamb we gave him without incident. In fact, the puppy was on the floor not too far from me, eating one of said component parts with evident relish.

My hand slipped and I cut a very long, very deep gash in the side of my left index finger.

I was fairly blase about it. So was my roommate. I do this sort of stupid shit all the time; no one is surprised when I injure myself. I said 'Ow' loud enough to get my roommate's attention, and asked her to get me a bandage; then I ran my finger under cold water for a moment, wrapped a paper towel around it, and applied pressure. I sat down.

I don't know how long I sat for, exactly. Closer to five minutes than to one; long enough for my roommate to empty one of the drawers in the refridgerator of vegetables that had gone moldy, and for her to wander over to the sink, peer into it, and say, 'Is this all chicken blood, or is it from you?' Long enough for her to ask me to keep an eye on the puppy in case he choked on a piece of bone, and for me to do so for a while; long enough for us both to fret over the way he was hanging his head and staggering a little before we determined that it was just puppy spasticness, not a life-or-death situation. Long enough for me to peek under the paper towel a couple of times, and see blood welling. I said, 'Hmm. It doesn't hurt any more.'

Everything I saw went splotchy and greenish, and my peripheral vision ceased to be. I could feel myself sweating. Had I not been sitting, I would have fallen over — had the paper towel not been more or less stuck to my hand, I would have dropped it, I was so weak. I was having trouble speaking, or trouble hearing: when I tried to tell my roommate that something was wrong, I could barely hear my own voice. Later, my roommate would tell me that all the color went out of my face.

She dragged me over to the couch and I stretched out on it with my paper towel. Time passed, and I may have dozed. By the time my roommate wandered over to slap a bandage on me, my sight had mostly cleared and I was not so weak. I waited for the last of the distortion in my vision — a weird smeary light show off to my right — to go away, which it did by literally shrinking, scaling down, until it disappeared, I washed the chicken off my hands, and then I went downstairs and talked to lstone about what sort of dog he ought to get. I'm pulling for a herding breed, me.

Conclusion: butter knives and safety scissors only for me, until I learn how to not be a great big spaz.

Comments

[lstone.livejournal.com]

It's up to my father, because it's going to be *his* dog, but I'm going to research the shiloh, and maybe argue for it.

[kiya]

If you can catch erispope around somewhere somewhen, the dog that lives with her parents is the dog that I think is a one a-them.

[kiya]

I think that sudden sort of plummet in the direction of shock and aftermath is about the third most disconcerting and unpleasant experience-sensation-thing I can think of. (But I can't remember the other two.)