Its funny. My Facebook memories told me that last year, February 26th, was the day we had our carbon monoxide scare in the house. Our house was (gratefully) stormed by the fire department, who tested and aired and retested and retested and aired the place our some more until we were for sure all safe. Conveniently enough, the kids were juuust poisoned enough that they slept through the entire thing. Win!
Our February 26th this year was different, but also significant, and worth sharing, I believe.
To start with, it was just one of those days. One of those days that leave me feeling ashamed and like a failure. A day of fighting and yelling and power struggling and exhaustion. It. Was. Hard. I was exhausted and overdone and on the verge of tears for most of the day. It was just one of those. I tell myself we all have them. I hope I’m telling the truth.
So it was a rough day as a whole, but we rolled through it. When I went to pick Dekker up from school, he was in a much better mood than the rest of us. He had been outside and with his friends, and had escaped the cabin fever! He was happy, and it helped. Picking him up from school ended a little rough, however, when I slipped on the ice outside and wrenched my back pretty badly. I didn’t go down, thank goodness, but I was in quite a bit of pain from that. But a sore back isn’t too terribly rare these days, so again, I tried to just roll with it. I had spoken to Brady on and off through the day and he knew how badly I was struggling. He assured me I should put my feet up and just survive until he got home. The promise of a break helped, too.
He got home at a pretty reasonable time, and I sat on the recliner and chatted with him while we reminisced about our days. He washed up and began to make supper for everyone.
And then he promptly hacked the end of his finger off into the veggie slicer with the cucumbers.
We have NEVER had blood like that in this house!! I’d add pictures, but they’re not for the faint of heart.
It was instantly pouring, and he stood over the sink, unsure of what to do. We’d put paper towel on it and it wasn’t even an obstacle. It was just gushing. Thank goodness, a friend of ours cut the end of his finger off back in the high school days, and I was able to call and ask what they had done. They confirmed what I figured – there’s nothing to stitch. Just stop the bleeding and cover it up for a bit. No reason to go in anywhere. So, we tried.
Spoiler alert. I didn’t get my break. But Brady also didn’t get to keep the end of his finger. So, lose lose.
It took a long time to get his finger to stop bleeding, but it happened, and he held the paper towel tightly to his finger all evening. But eventually, he removed the paper towel to check on the situation. And as you can likely predict, it aaaaall started up again. We were at a total loss.
So we called my mom, because she is the master of hacking her poor fingers to pieces in the kitchen. She came over (bless her heart!) and brought her first aid stuff with her. Sadly, none of us were well prepared enough to own gauze or anything like that, but she took a look and agreed with our basic idea of “just make the sucker stop bleeding.” At that point, we had ceased the bleeding and wrapped his finger in paper towel. We taped it to his finger with medical tape and went on to have a soak and an evening together. We both felt pretty weak and gross at that point, and had muffins for supper. After our bath, we decided we would anger his finger one last time, since we hadn’t had the forethought to smother the paper towel in polysporin before sticking it to his finger, and we figured it would be better to work on that in the evening so it could heal a bit overnight and hopefully be in better shape the next morning.
While he really didn’t seem to enjoy the pain of taking the paper towel off, it was bleeding less than we expected! We loaded some more paper towel up with polysporin and folded it over the tip of his finger. I ran to get the duct tape to tape the paper towel in place, while still leaving space around it to breathe and heal. Don’t ask me how it happened, but we were out of duct tape! We were clearly unprepared for this injury! So electrical tape did the trick, and everything was under control.
I’m happy to say that he is down to a plain old bandage now, and that he was able to put in a full day of work without too much fuss. But MY GOSH it was an ordeal in the moment!
Because of the general of the stress of the day and the evening that followed, my already-angry body didn’t reset overnight, and its been a sore, achy day. I’m SO ready for another soak and hopefully a less overwhelming evening. And that we all keep our digits, ideally…