Inessentials

Last night I was supposed to go over to a friend’s house for dinner. Two guys, some beers, and a whole lotta grilling. That was the plan.

Before I left, I was helping Nicole start dinner. I was chopping an onion, was at the very end of the onion, trying to get in one more slice before I rotated and finished dicing. Well, the knife was dull, and some other excuses, and what have you, and I slipped and cut my thumb. I’ve nicked my fingers before while doing kitchen prep, but this one was worse than usual. I actually sliced about 3/4 of the way through my thumb. Fortunately, it was only the very tip, about a 1/4 inch from the top, all above the thumbnail.

Nicole has never had stitches. I’ve had them twice, including once in the back of a guy’s house in a foreign country, but that’s not this story. After getting a look at the little flap on the top, I was worried there wasn’t enough there to stitch up, but it was close enough that it probably warranted stitches. So off we went to the urgent care, dinnerless.

It took close to two hours to see the doctor, which meant the bleeding had mostly stopped. She was tempted to just glue it shut, but the bleeding hadn’t completely stopped. She poked, prodded, and manhandled the thumb, which unsurprisingly restarted the bleeding. Five mini-shots of lydocaine (doctor: “I can actually see the skin puff up where I inject the lydocaine”), three stitches, and two bandaids. I go back in a week to have the stitches taken out.

Too bad I didn’t pay closer attention to Hung’s knife skills.