If I were to be completely honest…

…I’m kind of…um…well, not exactly avoiding y’all, but…it’s more like…welllllllll…

OK. Fine. I did something so astonishingly stupid weekend before last that I have no idea how to even begin describing it. Then hard on the heels of that, right when I was feeling almost human enough to talk to other humans again, well, I got to the end of the first cycle and all hell broke loose.

I swear, my life lately has been a kind of gore-fest. And while it is kind of funny, it’s also kind of not.

It’s kind of gross.

And I don’t want to deal with any of it, or talk about it, really…but since it has been Center Stage for the last two weeks, it’s also kind of like the only thing I have to talk about right now.

I know. My dilemmas, they are epic.

So, what did I do a couple weekends ago?

Well. I knifed myself in the thigh.

Literally.

With a knife.

{face-palm}

SO, I was making a sort of watering system for some of the container garden plants. I wanted to end up with something that would seep not pour, and do it in a fairly wide patch. The tool that got me this result from the thick plastic I was using for the project was an 8” kitchen knife. So I’m standing there cheerfully whacking away at the plastic with this thing…and then one of the girls erupted around the corner into the kitchen. RUNNING. In the kitchen. In spite of many lectures about running + kitchen = DON’T.

I took my eyeballs off what I was doing (but did not stop my hand and arm from moving, this is an important point!), opened my mouth to yell at her about running in the kitchen, and…thwhack.

You know that split second between doing something, and the pain hitting you? Yeah. Like something out of a movie, that split second sort of stretched out. The husband was nattering on about something not five feet from me. The kids were bouncing all over the place. And there I stood, frozen in time, ever-so-slowly coming to grips with the information being fed to me through my assorted sensory input channels. Did I just do what I think I did? Are you sure it isn’t just hung up on your jeans or something? Oh. Blood. Bleeding. Oh! Yikes! Fair bit of bleeding there, really soaking that denim pretty good and, oh hey. Pain. Pain! Yeah, there it is, pain part coming through now…yeah. Um. I’m going to have to say that, given the evidence here…yes. Yes I DID just slam that @^*@ing knife straight on into my thigh there…

Now, some people are yellers. The husband, in fact, is one of those types. He will bellow like a bee-stung calf over a stubbed toe. He has sent me into heart-pounding panic because of his shouts of horrible, life-altering pain over something like…a splinter. A finger pinched in a cupboard door. And so forth.

Some people are weepers. “Ohmygah ohmygah ohmygah! Sob! Sob! Sob!”

Some people are cussers. “Oh fer @^*@&'s sake! ^*@&! @^*&@(^*&@! Argh, ^&*@^&@!!!!!”

And then there are people like me, people I herewith dub The Hiders.

Here is the sum total of my outward expression of pain and disbelief at the time of injury: “…ooof…”

And then, well, I calmly and without making the slightest hint of fuss, poinked the knife out of my thigh and – with remarkable speed for somebody with a hole in their leg – made for the upstairs (!!!!) bathroom so that I could assess the damage without any meddling busybodies undo emotion entering into Things.

I’m afraid I’m not kidding. Every time I do this, afterward I say, “OK, that is so stupid, and I am never going to do that again!” – and then, the next time something like this happens, where am I? Hiding somewhere, while I frantically get myself cleaned up and self-assessed as to Need To See A Doctor Quickly lest somebody else try to get a vote before I have made up my mind on the subject.

I’ve done this since I was a child. When I was somewhere around four years old, I fell on the sliding glass door runners at my grandmother’s house, and slashed my knees open. She suddenly realized I wasn’t making a horrific racket anymore and went looking for me…eventually, she found me hiding in her water heater closet with a bunch of Kleenex, trying to clean up my knees without getting caught.

I have no idea why I did it then, and I really don’t have a good reason now either. Maybe I’m more of a ‘lurking on the sidelines making smart-assed remarks out of the corner of my mouth’ sort of clown, not the ‘lookit me! I’m juggling eggs and your best crystal wine glasses with wine in them in the middle of your white carpet! WHOOPEE!” type. I despise being fussed over, and I don’t want to be “helped” when I don’t feel well.

I stop just short of resenting the people who bring me food and fluff my pillows. I’m that patient in the hospital who is always deciding they’re going to just get up and go to the bathroom their damned self, without waiting for the nurse to respond to the call button. Or even using the call button.

So what if I have a 7” hole in my abdomen and am missing a bunch of organs now?! Pfffffft!!! I can get out of this bed by myself, and I will get out of this bed by myself! I’ve been using the bathroom without help since I was two-frickin-years-old, and I will be damned if I need help now…

…and then I will follow this up by returning to bed, turning a sickly gray color, covered in sweat, but nevertheless gritting my teeth and refusing to admit that it was a really, really bad idea, and that maybe, just maybe, a little hit of morphine might be a good idea right about now…I’M FINE, DAMMIT, I’M JUST A LITTLE TIRED, YEAH, THAT’S WHAT IT IS, A LITTLE TIRED, I DON’T NEED YOUR DARN DRUGS, IT’S JUST A LITTLE PINCH!!!!!

(I know. I’m going to make such an awesome old woman someday. Get in line, Young People Of The World, being my in-home caregiver is going to be the most popular job in the world someday!)

After a near fight with the husband over it (on a related note, he really needs to learn to knock before he unlocks doors and barges into rooms while somebody inside is yelling, “DON’T COME IN HERE, I MEAN IT! I’M FINE!!”), we ended up sidetracked into a bizarre “who has had more holes in their flesh, with and without stitches” contest. (Need you even ask? I so win that one.)

Starting to argue was stupid and the “oh yeah? Well, this one time I fell off a skateboard and slid about four feet on my knees…!” thing was even dumber, but! It served a very important purpose, which was that by the time I had trumped his last major-enough-to-actually-remember injury…the bleeding had stopped and it was obvious that I was, in fact, right.
Sucker did not require a trip to the ER for stitches. It may have been a bit on the marginal side, but a little over a week later I’ve got a thin little almost-nothing of a future scar forming and as long as I don’t get too enthusiastic about things like stairs it hardly even hurts anymore.

Just enough to keep me humble, really.

Eh, well. There are certain perils involved in Being Me, and I guess this is one of them: I’m going to do things that don’t exactly end well for me, and then I’m going to more or less shrug them off, fretting a little bit that maybe I shouldn’t, but, well, at the same time, in all likelihood it’s going to end up a no big deal sort of thing…and a few sidetracks into what exactly causes tetanus, and horrifying myself with research around things like detecting wound infections and how the wounds from my alien abduction turned gangrenous.

(Stupid aliens. You’d think they would have figured out Neosporin by now, what with all that Advanced Technology and some junk.)

(It really is fine. Well on its way to becoming an awesome story to traumatize the girls in front of their boyfriends. Ya, just don’t expect her to be safe in the kitchen, not with MY genes…seriously, this one time…?!)