The Injury

It started with a balloon.

I bought balloons for my son and he loves to pop them with scissors.

Naturally, this seems like a safe, fun way for a 3-year-old to get his kicks before bedtime. I'm such a good mom.

So tonight we popped balloons with scissors. I know. But I had put in a full 8 hours of work and my husband was on the road, and my son had just finished a 1.5-hour tantrum because I wouldn't take him to his grandma's house. ("I WANT MY GWANDMA WOBERTS! WAAAAAA!")

I was worn down. So I blew up balloons and supervised while my son popped them with a pair of sharp-ended scissors.

At length, I announced that it was bedtime and my son dropped the scissors and we both forgot about them as I tried to chase him down and wrangle him into his pajamas. At one point he grabbed a blanket and hid under it, and I lunged for his arm. 

MISTAKE.

Mid-lunge, I slid my foot across the floor and it unfortunately met with the forgotten scissors.

It was OK for about 3 seconds. Well, not OK. Not pleasant, but not horrible yet. There was no pain. I just felt a sort of weird pre-panic sensation, that moment where the cartoon character runs off a cliff and hangs there in mid-air, looks down, and realizes they're going to fall.

Then I lifted my foot, expecting the scissors to slid out again. They didn't. They were stuck there in midair, perpendicular to my foot, and I instinctively reached down and pulled them out. I pulled a lot longer than I thought I'd have to.

THAT'S when the pain started.  I let out an unearthly howl as blood spurted out my heel. I looked down at the scissors and saw about 1/2 inch of the point covered in my blood. I never knew heels could bleed that much. My little boy looked at me with a mixture of fright and curiousity on his face. Then he wet his pants, picked up my phone, and ran off.

I had other things to deal with right then, so I plopped on the couch and howled some more, looking at my foot which was bleeding all over the carpet. I allowed that to go on for a while until there were a few nice-sized puddles of blood on the floor. Then I came to a little bit and started screaming, "JC, I STABBED MY FOOT! I STABBED MY FOOOOOOOOT!"

After a couple of minutes of carrying on,  I started to realize that I was the adult in this situation. Also, the carpet was getting pretty blood soaked so I figured I needed to move the carnage to a second location that would be easier to clean.

Still sobbing and howling, I limped to the bathroom, leaving a nice trail of blood droplets all across the floor. I sat on the edge of the tub and bellered a little more, because it HURT and also because I WAS BLEEDING ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Then my son ran in with the phone, saying, "My Mommy stab herself! She stab her in the foot!"

I heard my husband's voice on the other end, telling our son to give me the phone.

At that moment, I began to feel EXACTLY like Michael Scott in that Office episode, The Injury. Go watch it on Netflix and you'll know what I'm talking about. Season 2, Episode 12. You're welcome.

My husband said, "Honey, what happened? JC is telling me that you stabbed yourself."

"YES! I S-S-S-STABBED MY FOOT WITH A P-P-PAIR OF SEWING SCISSORS. THE SHARP ONES!"

(My Inner Michael: "I'm hurt. I have hurt myself...Oh, this is not looking good, Pam!... BLURRGH! I burned my foot, very badly, on my Foreman Grill and I now need someone to come bring me in to work!")

"Are you OK?"

"Yes. I'm fine. IT HURRRRTS! Seriously though, I'm fine."

("I'm sitting here with a bloody stump of a foot!")

"Do you need to go get stitches?"

"No! No, really, it's not THAT bad." Beller.

(Inner Michal: "Don't freak out. I forbid anybody to freak out. Clearly I have had a very serious accident, but I will recover...I just want to be treated normally.")

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, there's blood everywhere but I'm OK. S-s-s-seriously." Howl.

"I'm going to have you hang up with me and I'm going to call my parents and have them come help you."

"No, hon, don't call them. Seriously! It's fine! I'm fine. There's no need to c-c-c-call your parents! I'll be f-f-f-fine." Sob, sob, sob.

("I don't want any special treatment, Pam. I just want you to treat me like you would a family member who has undergone some sort of serious physical trauma. I don't think that's too much to ask.")

"Hang up. I'm calling them."

I sat there, trying to get all the sobbing, bellering, and howling under control because I knew that my mother-in-law would be showing up soon. Sure enough, there she was a few minutes later and I was sitting there surrounded by all these pools of blood, with JC removing his peed pants and me looking up at my sweet mother-in-law with my very scary-looking, red-eyed, mascara-stained face.

("Help! Help! ...I fell off the toilet. I'm stuck between the toilet and the wall. Get Pam. Get Ryan. He needs to lift me, and he needs to clean me up a little bit. Bring a wet towel.")

It was not pretty. My foot was really starting to hurt after having its flesh separated by 1/2 inch of cold hard titanium. Also, my house was is a holy wreck and that was embarrassing. But my MIL suggested Oxy-Clean for the blood stains everywhere and I went to work on that while she whisked a traumatized JC into his bedroom for story time.

In case you should doubt:

The weapon.

 The wound, after being cleaned up.

Eventually we got everything under control. I began to realize that my wound wasn't as bad as it looked and felt. I started to think that maybe, just maybe, I could be a drama queen. I drenched it in hydrogen peroxide and applied a band-aid.

My MIL was a lifesaver, getting JC into his pajamas, listening to him tell the story of my stabbing approximately 10,000 times, and reading him stories while I scrubbed blood out of the floor, and wallowed in self-pity.

I'm afraid to think what will happen when I have an actual injury.

Joke's On Me

Yesterday my husband played a practical joke on me. The thing he knows about me is, I'm gullible.

 I'm talking GULLIBLE. You guys, when I was about 12 my parents told me that all pasta is made from different sizes of dehydrated cow veins. They said that macaroni came from the bigger blood vessels and spaghetti was the little blood vessels and that the hole in the middle was just so small you couldn't see it. AND I BELIEVED THEM. UNTIL I WAS 17 YEARS OLD.

 I'm so gullible that when the movie Mulan came out, my mom told me that there was a race of people in Asia that have yellow slit eyes, like the villain, Shan-Yu. I THOUGHT IT WAS REAL and I spent, like, the next YEAR of my life watching out for people from this slitted, yellow-eyed race of Asians.

I know this is a character flaw of mine, but I can't help it. You would think after 27 years on this earth, I'd have figured a few things out. Nope. My husband exploits this to his full advantage. The thing is, he botched his joke and I STILL fell for it. Yes.

I have problems.

So what happened was, I got a text message from Josh (my husband) yesterday while I was getting ready for work:

Josh: U need to call this number, 704-319-7251, they've called me twice trying to get U. Not sure who it is but it sounds important. Let me know.

That didn't bug me too bad. I got a new phone number not too long ago and people (who are not with-it enough to keep up with my new phone numbers) call various family members trying to reach me (Get with the program, people!).

So I call the number and I hear a bunch of horoscope stuff. I get very, very confused when I'm confronted with horoscopes. I can't understand the point of them. Just the concept of horoscopes, to me, sounds bat-poo crazy. I'm not even sure what sign I am. So when I heard the pre-recorded voice on the other line saying something about an odor from Uranus (what? If I were a horoscope writer, I wouldn't phrase things like that. People might think they're hearing something offensive. Take note, horoscope writers.) I hung up the phone, figuring that there was a mix-up somewhere. So I texted Josh back and told him I thought it was a prank. Then he responded:

I actually gave u the wrong number. I mistyped it. The number is 704-319-7242.

So I called it. And then STUFF WENT DOWN. I heard this:

"Hello, the following is an urgent message from the National Justice Center. If you are hearing this message it mean that our records indicate that you failed to appear for jury duty last Monday morning at 9:00 am. Multiple notifications of your jury summons were sent to you both by the US Postal Service, as well as electronically to the email address we have on file for you. Unfortunately ignoring these notifications and failing to appear in court for jury duty is a Class 3 Misdemeanor. To  ake arrangements to pay the 500 fine for failure to appear for jury duty, press 2. To make arrangements to begin serving the 30 day jail sentence for failure to appear for jury duty, press 3."
 
At that point, I hung up. There was more to the message, and the automated voice was still talking, but I could not process it. I was FREAKING out. It was like having an out-of-body experience. All the sounds around me seemed muffled. I was starting to feel the effects of adrenaline and I started to cry. As soon as I heard the words "failed to appear for jury duty" I knew that all my worst nightmares had finally come true. It's happening, I thought. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?! I'M GOING TO JAIL!!

Josh, unwittingly, had stumbled upon one of my worst fears. First of all, I've made it almost 10 years as an adult without getting a jury summons, so a situation in which I get one and don't know it, seems extremely believable. Second, I watch Lockup:Raw, and Locked Up Abroad, guys. I know that jail is not a place I want to be. I still have nightmares about getting arrested for a crime I didn't know that I committed. I dream up all kinds of scenarios in my head, ESPECIALLY when I get pulled over by a cop. I'm always thinking, "When they run my license what if they find an unpaid ticket or something and I GO TO JAIL?"

Don't ask me why I am scared of this. I've paid all 2 of my speeding tickets, I've paid for the 1 parking ticket I've ever gotten, and I never agreed to carry a stranger's bag across the borders of anywhere, anytime. Through diligent reality-TV watching, I've determined that unpaid tickets and smuggling account for 95% of all jailed criminals. The other 5% are serial killers that try to entrap you by playing recordings of babies outside your door.

I called Josh back, sobbing, and said, "JOSH, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THOSE PEOPLE WANTED? THEY ARE SAYING I DIDN'T APPEAR FOR JURY DUTY!" Seriously, I was hysterical.


Josh said, "Hon, did you listen to the whole message?"

"NO, I HUNG UP BEFORE IT FINISHED. I DIDN'T KNOW I HAD JURY DUTY, JOSH. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO. I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING TO ME."

Josh said, "Hon-"

"I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT JURY DUTY, I PROMISE, AND NOW THEY'RE SAYING THAT I'M A F-F-F-FELON!!"

"Hon, calm down. It's a pra-"

That didn't even register. "I'M GOING TO J-J-J-JAAAAILLLL!" I was wailing.

"Oh sweetie, don't cry, it's not real."

It was starting to dawn on me then. "What?"

"It was a prank phone line. I thought it would be funny to have you call it. I didn't know you wouldn't listen to the whole thing! If you had, you would've known it was just a joke!"

Me: "I'm not going to jail?"

Josh: "No, hon, you're not going to jail."

"You're a jerk."

"Hon, I'm sorry! I didn't know it would make you CRY. You were supposed to listed to the whole message."

"You're making this up to me."

I finally felt relief but it took a full 15 minutes for me to stop crying.

My husband has no IDEA the things I'm making him do for me to compensate for this horrible, horrible prank. It involves a spa day, a shopping spree, and him making me dinner for approximately the next 5,000 years.