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.