One of Those Days!

 

by Pa Rock

Bloody Fool

Today was supposed to have gone according to schedule.   I am leaving for an extended road trip on Sunday, and for the last several days I have been carefully checking things off of a list in preparation for that excursion.  I have been to the phone store and made sure that I can still use my phone in the event I cross an international border, and I have been to see my insurance agent also with concerns centered on driving into Canada.  Our new dog has chewed up one of each of the two pairs of shoes that I routinely wear, so I have gotten those replaced.  I bought plenty of (US) postcard stamps, so I am ready to send my grandkids some views of my trip, and I got the car serviced early this week.   Yesterday I completed a two-day siege (six-and-a-half hours total) of getting the yard mowed.  

My son did all of the weed-eating after he got off work, and today the yard looks beautiful!  Thanks, Nick!

Today I was going to get the car filled with gas, buy some road trip groceries, and begin packing - and I probably will get most of that done before the sun sets, but the day started with a radical detour.

One of my first activities every morning is to get dressed in yesterday's dirty clothes and take the dogs for their walks.  It is a really big deal for them and for me, because I use that dog-walking duty to log about 5,000 steps onto my pedometer - half of the daily goal of 10,000 steps.  This morning I was sitting on the side of my tall iron bed listening to a newscast from NPR and putting on my footwear Michael Stivik-style (putting one sock and one shoe on one foot, and then moving to the second foot and repeating the process),   When I had completed the right foot and turned to concentrate on the left, I focused on a small, shiny black scab, shaped like a little round bb, that has been on my ankle for a month of so and never caused me any problem.  Today, God knows why, I decided to pick it off.

And the blood came forth like an oil well gusher!    It flowed, and oozed, and poured in copious amounts, immediately covering my foot and leaving big, wet stain on the carpet.  I used the sock that I had planned to put on the foot to try and staunch the flow, but the sock was quickly drenched in blood and it just kept flowing.  (I regularly take two blood-thinners, baby aspirin and Plavix.)

Of course I was home alone.

Not knowing what to do, I did the sensible thing of tracking the blood through most of the house as I gathered up tissue and paper towels and rags and other things to try and keep blood in my body.  Finally I decided that I probably should go to the Emergency Room at the hospital - about three miles from my house.  I put the other sandal - the one the dog had chewed on - on the bare, bleeding foot and squished my way to the car.  I had been smart enough to grab my keys and wallet on the way out of the house, but once I had squished my way to the car, I realized that I had forgotten my phone.  I thought "I am in an emergency situation here, and I really should have my phone."  So I squished my way back into the house and got it.

I made it to the hospital without incident - and without passing out - and parked in the lot of the Emergency Room.  By the time I arrived the carpet on driver's side of the car was soaked in blood, and as I got out and headed to the door, which was about thirty feet away, I left blood on the parking lot and all along the sidewalk.  Once inside, I also left tracks on the floor and a sizable pool of blood on the floor next to the reception desk.  All of that was from a wound that was literally not much larger than a pin prick.)

The ER staff was wonderful - as they had been on my two previous broken-arm visits - and they quickly had me on a bed in an exam room, and a doctor was at my side surprisingly soon.  He said the scab had been attacked to a very small varicose vein and hence the eruption.  He gave me one fancy stitch and said to have it removed in eight or ten days.  No, he said, it should not wait until after my trip, and the best thing to do would be to stop at an "Urgent Care" somewhere along the way to have the stitch removed.

They were still mopping up my blood inside of the Emergency Room as I was leaving thirty minutes later, and a three-man crew was also outside washing down the sidewalk and the parking lot around my car.  I apologized to everyone sincerely and profusely for screwing up their morning.

As I got into my car I was still wearing a dry sock and a sandal on my right foot, but on my left I had a long hospital sock,  I got behind the wheel, placed my feet firmly on the floor, and felt the blood oozing up from the floor and into the hospital sock.  Driving home many of my thoughts were the the deeply philosophical talk that Michael Stivik and his father-in-law, Archie Bunker, had about whether the proper way to dress was to put on both socks and then both shoes (Archie-style), or one sock and then the shoe (Michael-style).  I had gone with the Michael-style and knew that I could at least hop into the house when I got home without making a bigger mess, an argument much like Michael's from a half-century earlier when he had argued that in case of a fire, if he had just one sock and shoe on he could hop to safety, and Archie, just wearing socks, would get his feet burned.

The mind wanders when you have lost a lot of blood, and I figured that I was at least a quart low!

As I neared my house, I had to drive around an a truck with flashing lights that was parked by the side of the road and where workmen were apparently working on the power lines.  When I got home the power was off.

Of course the stinking power was off.  It was one of those days!