The Slice Saga Continues

Yesterday I let it sit. I avoided water. I kept it safe. I'll confess, I was a wee bit afraid of what I might find if I opened it up. Today, that was no longer an option.
I did my best to cover it for my shower, but in the midst of it all, the water began to leak in. I looked down and suddenly discovered that the little bit of plastic bag I'd taped on was full of blood. Hmmm... definitely not so good.
I tend to pride myself on being pretty tough. I mean, I broke my back when I was thirteen and didn't even cry. That has to count for something. Generally blood isn't a huge issue for me, but every now and then...well, it just is. For instance there was the time in Hong Kong when I was taking a baby to the hospital and things didn't turn out very well. I was doing my best to keep little Tsz Ching quiet and calm while they squeezed individual drops of blood out of her hand, and thought it was going okay. then I started to feel a little woozy. Next thing I knew there were strangers waking me up. To make a long, and rather amusing story short, I passed out and hit the floor so hard that I broke the frame of my glasses into my head and had such a serious concussion that a week later I was still hardly able to do anything but sleep.
Back to this morning, I thought I was doing okay with the sight of the blood, but then I had to deal with actually taking off the bandages. It was not just painful, it was downright disgusting. When you bleed enough to soak through five bandages there's a lot of blood just hanging out. The farther I went the more light headed I got. In the end I can count at least 5 maybe 6 times when I nearly passed out and had to literally curl up in a ball on the floor until the nausea and spinning stars passed.
In the end I did get down to the skin. It was far from pretty, but I think it should heal up all right. Even if I had gone to the doctor I probably would have just gotten a butterfly bandage.
I survived another evening of work, and now we're watching some Cesko Slovenska Ma Talent (Czech and Slovakia have Talent). Good fun. It'll really help to prepare me for being culturally in tune when we head back at the end of next month.

Slice

Well, I seem to have survived my first week in my new managerial position. Kind of got thrown to the wolves a bit, but all the people I work with know a lot more about the closing shift than I do, and they're pretty much fantastic, so it wasn't all that difficult. Still not overly thrilled with the new timing of it all. I've found myself staying up later, but also enjoying the ability to roll over and fall back to sleep maybe a little too much. Rather defeats the purpose of the 7:30 alarm when I don't manage to pull myself out of bed until 8, or 8:30, or, um 9:30 as it was by the end of the week. Slowly those few precious writing hours become a thing of the past and I'm back to the procrastinating fool I've so sadly become.
But with all things, once I get the hang of it this new schedule will also become routine. Especially seeing as how I'm working closing pretty much the whole month. Oh the joy.
Things were rolling pretty well by last night. I'd made it through a week, and had managed to get basically everything completed that I was supposed to do. I was in the midst of throwing out the trash when, suddenly, SLICE! And we're not just talking a little scrape. We're talking a chunk of flesh literally hanging off my finger followed by a lovely gushing of blood. It didn't hurt all that much, but that might mean it's because it was really deep/clean. Hmmm...
Anyhow, I quickly relocked and started the trash compactor. Did you know it's a crime to run a trash compactor if you're under the age of 18. Federal. Seriously. I can understand safety first and all, but a crime? Wee bit silly, don't you think. Reminds me of how a customer said she was old enough to still remember when she was free in America...Do we maybe underestimate the ability of people to generally make wise decisions most of the time and not need laws to tell them how to live life? Just an idea.
That really rumbled into an aside awfully quickly. I've been thinking of writing a piece on Stream of Consciousness recently. Might be fun. Anyhow, back to the story at hand, or more appropriately, the story of my hand. I rushed to get a bandage as the blood really started to spurt out. I continued on to the bathroom, and a colleague kindly opened the door for me. The blood was really flowing freely by then and I rinsed it off as much as I could stand. If I let it be it didn't hurt to much, but even the most minimal water pressure was excruciating.
I tried to staunch the bleeding and dry myself up a bit with some toilet paper - no paper towels in our restroom. It helped a bit, but the blood just kept coming so I wrapped the bandage on. By the time I got out of the restroom to the fitting room (the hall is about fifteen/twenty feet long) blood was already oozing out of the bandage. Not so good.
I added a second, then a third. Pretty picture, eh? Of course then I was called up to a register. I helped a couple people, and by then those bandages were getting filled up. In all I ended up with five plasters wrapped tightly around my right index finger. Even now, under the puffy wrappings, the blood is visible, but it the last one was pretty tight so it helped to slow it down. I can honestly say I've never soaked through even one bandage before. It was quite disturbing.
And get this. We had our safety lunch today. Celebrating almost 600 days accident free. I couldn't very well end the winning streak. Basically, as long as I don't have to go to the doctor we're still good to go. It's been more than 24 hours now, but I'm still not quite brave enough to cut off all the layers and see what's going on inside. I'll give it a little more time and maybe then...
On that note, I'm thinking of making the bloody finger cookies I read about in Rachel Ray for our staff Halloween dessert potluck on the 31st. I imagine I can have a pretty decent picture to go by.