In our household, we have developed something of a familiarity with the emergency room.
There were my two broken arms and the time I skewered my bare foot on a toothpick that had lodged in the carpet pointy end up. (It was a 1970s shag carpet. Any carpet you have to rake is a disaster waiting to happen.)
Then there were my husband’s two broken legs, his encounters with various power tools, and the time he lodged a telephone-pole-sized splinter across the knuckles of his hand.
We’re not quite in Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor territory, but we know the drill.
When I do something to myself that necessitates a trip to the ER, I don’t quibble about it. I want to go RIGHT NOW.
My husband, on the other hand, needs to be persuaded. Him being a man and all.
Our most recent foray into the land of little curtained booths and endless paperwork was on his behalf.
My husband came up from the basement and uttered those words that I’ve heard before: “Hey, come look at this and see if you think I need stitches.”
He was standing over the kitchen sink, blood dripping off his hand and running down the drain.
“Whatever did you do to yourself?” I asked, peering over the faucet to get a better angle on the damage.
“Took a chunk out of this finger with my biscuit cutter,” he said, wincing a bit as the water sluiced the blood away.
For those who might be confused, a biscuit cutter is a tool that cuts little slices into sides of boards so they can be joined with cute little wood thingies called biscuits. There’s no baking involved.
“Well,” I said in my role as advisor, “I think it needs stitches.” He had asked for my opinion on this very subject.
“You think so?” He inspected his damaged digit carefully. “Maybe we can just bandage it up tight.”
We discussed this a bit. I never wavered from my pro-ER position. During the discussion he mentioned that it had taken him 10 minutes and a whole roll of paper towels to mop up the shop. He also mentioned that he had miraculously avoided getting any blood on his project.
Finally he allowed as how it probably did need a stitch or two.
“OK,” I said. “Let me put on some makeup before we go.”
Now, when he tells this story, that’s the part of the story that he stresses, always with disbelief echoing in his voice. “And you know what she said then? I’m bleeding like a stuck pig and she says she has to go put on some makeup! Can you believe it?”
He was entertaining a group of people at a Christmas party with this narrative, thoroughly enjoying the gasps of dismay from the males in the audience.
Another man then volunteered his own version of female idiocy. He told of how his wife woke him in the middle of the night to inform him that she’d gone into labor with their first child.
They had prepared for this moment. The suitcase was packed. The car was gassed up. He put the suitcase in the car, pulled the car up to the door, and went inside the house to retrieve his wife.
She wasn’t there at the door waiting anxiously for his tender assistance.
“You know where I found her?” he said, incredulous still these many years later. “She was in the bathroom washing her hair! Can you believe it?”
All the men shook their heads in mutual consternation. I, of course, was thinking, “So? What’s wrong with that?”
Carolyn Trout, retired Joplin Public Library librarian, lives in Joplin.
