accident prone
Last night, over dinner with a friend, we were talking about the idea of writing up character sheets for ourselves, and what sort of stats we would give each other.
"I need to give myself some kind of low dexterity or agility score," I said, "I can dance ok and type fast, but I can be embarassingly clumsy sometimes. Maybe that isn't low DEX. Maybe it's a Luck stat."
I was, and still am, accident-prone. There were three occasions where I, as a child, fell down flights of stairs. My brother and I had a phase where we'd spin ourselves around until we were dizzy, except he would collapse on a soft grassy lawn, and I'd happen to tumble into a bush of thorny roses. There was the one time that I was a teenager, and playing tag with a bunch of friends in the middle of a forest under a full moon and clotheslined myself. Then, as an adult, I've been prey to a few bike crashes and skiing accidents.
One consequence of this is that I am used to pain, and injury and dealing with it. I was doing this backroads tour of Vermont last year, and at some point, while descending on a twisty dirt road, I lost control of my bike and crashed. When I got up, I realized that I couldn't see out of my left eye, and while a small part of me was fretting about some bit of debris that had shredded my eye1 the practical part was running diagnostics. I put a hand to my face and realized my eye was fine. It was just covered in blood. That same practical part, got up, staggered to the side of the road, and, for want of a mirror, took out my phone, took a photo of my face and used that to figure out where the cut was.
This is all to say that Sunday morning, I was cleaning the Raleigh.. While running the chain through a rag that I was holding, a bird had flown by and startled me, causing my left hand to momentarily squeeze the rag and then get dragged backward. And as the teeth of my back gear bit into my thumb, one small part of me was responding to the pain, and the practical part was moving my body to my first aid supplies.
I like to believe that I have a fairly high threshold for pain. I've been burned and sliced and fractured, and I can now add "punctured" to that list. The thing you have to know is that I had gotten complacent. I had been cleaning the bike for the better part of an hour, going on cycles of degreasing and wiping and spraying and wiping and brushing and wiping, and this was the last cycle of applying lubricant to the chain, and my mind was drifting to other plans for that day. The chain was going at a fairly fast clip, so when my hand got caught and dragged into the gears, the gears bit deep. It wasn't just a cut, and there is a reason why gears are said to have teeth.
So, I spent the next ten minutes kneeling next to my sink; staggered by the pain. I was running hot water and soap to clean all of the grease and dirt off the injury area, trying not to think about how dirty the rags or parts were when the accident happened. Then it was swabbing with alcohol and applying pressure to the wound, and realizing that there was still blood dripping into my sink. I turned my thumb over and realized that I had three different punctures because the chain dragged my thumb through three teeth of the rear sprocket.
I have never actually found myself crying because of an injury (at least not since I broke my arm when I was six, but that was more from fear about why my arm wasn't working than pain) but I found myself blinking back some tears when I was putting alcohol on those wounds. Man, they went deep.
So, more cleaning, more alcohol swabbing and then finally a small layer of first aid ointment and a scarf of gauze. Thankfully, the bleeding stopped and I could start typing, because I needed to look up what you should do when you get stabbed by a machine part.
Right. Tetanus.
When silentq and I went to Kilimanjaro, the Travel Clinic at Mt. Auburn gave these nifty WHO immunization booklets that we could use for tracking our vaccines and shots, so that we could prove to various countries that we were, indeed, immunized against yellow fever and malaria and smallpox. I had been using them for the past four years for tracking flu shots, but there was no recent record for a tetanus booster.
So, I ditched my early plans for that morning, brought the bike down and rode to the hospital. Hey, at least the chain was running well now.
At emergency room registration, the orderly asked me how I was doing and I paused and said, "I was fine, but about thirty minutes ago, I got my hand caught in the drivetrain of my bicycle, and my left thumb was gouged by a gear. The wound is cleaned and dressed with a coating of bacitracin, but I don't have clear records of my last tetanus booster and would like one."
"Jesus, you make it sound like you're ordering a pizza. Here fill this out and have a seat over there."
I was seen a few minutes later, by a tiny nurse with salt and pepper hair who called me "Sonny" and when I described the accident to her, she looked up at me and said, "congratulations, that is the grossest thing I've heard this week."
"Slow week?"
"It's Sunday. The week's just getting started, my boy. Don't flatter yourself."
Once she determined that I was not going to die in the next fifteen minutes, she left me in a room to wait for the next emergency physician to come by. I played Sudoku on my phone with my non bloody right hand.
The doctor who arrived was a fellow about my age, who talked quickly and took one look at my dressing and asked, "you did this yourself?"
"yeah, with what I had on hand."
"Not bad, but let's take that off and clean the wound up a little more. What do you do for work? concert pianist? surgeon? do you need this hand?"
"uhh... I work with computers, I need to type."
"oh, that's fine, don't worry. We won't treat you any different. I'm just messin' with you."
Jesus, what's up with the Sunday shift in this hospital?
Regardless, he cleaned the wound with soap and water, applied a fresh dressing to it and shot me up with a tetanus booster and wrote out a prescription for antibiotics. As I headed home, I thought about all of the injuries that I've given myself over the years. Some of them, like the bike crashes, I always acknowledged as an inherent part of risk. I've gotten away with my fair share, but averages say that it would catch up to me eventually, and now, as I'm older I've started to see the wisdom in quitting when I'm ahead of certain outcomes. But then, there's stuff like this that's just stupid negligence, and I can't help but wonder if I'm really missing some level of basic precaution ... like the way people with Asperger's are unable to appropriately interpret social cues, some of us just aren't able to look at a risky situation and fully understand how badly it can all go wrong.
I spent part of this morning, over breakfast, reading this article in Outside about an adventure writer enrolling in a Wilderness First Aid course. It's something that I've been passively interested in, but this is a full on First Responder class that requires ten days in the middle of Wyoming, so you treat it like you would a two week vacation. It's starting to feel kind of compelling.
Epilogue -- after getting home, I carried on with my afternoon plans, which included a Greek Easter party and stopping at a flower shop in Union Square to buy the beginning of an herb garden. I got home as the sun was setting and had started packing for another camping trip that I was planning for this weekend. I have this little metal pop-up candle lantern that I was planning on using, and while trying to pop it open, I wound squeezing something a little too hard and caused all of the components to explode outwards spectacularly. Nothing broke, but as I was trying to reassemble the lantern, I realized that my hands were, once again, covered in blood because one of the metal pieces nicked my finger and caused it to start spurting.
I'd have slammed my face into my kitchen table if not for the fact that I had already clearly lost enough blood that day.
1 since that bike crash, btw, I have been really curious to know what it feels like to put one eye out. I don't actually want to know for myself ... I'd be fine with a realistic graphic fictional descrption somewhere. You know, for future diagnostic purposes.
"I need to give myself some kind of low dexterity or agility score," I said, "I can dance ok and type fast, but I can be embarassingly clumsy sometimes. Maybe that isn't low DEX. Maybe it's a Luck stat."
I was, and still am, accident-prone. There were three occasions where I, as a child, fell down flights of stairs. My brother and I had a phase where we'd spin ourselves around until we were dizzy, except he would collapse on a soft grassy lawn, and I'd happen to tumble into a bush of thorny roses. There was the one time that I was a teenager, and playing tag with a bunch of friends in the middle of a forest under a full moon and clotheslined myself. Then, as an adult, I've been prey to a few bike crashes and skiing accidents.
One consequence of this is that I am used to pain, and injury and dealing with it. I was doing this backroads tour of Vermont last year, and at some point, while descending on a twisty dirt road, I lost control of my bike and crashed. When I got up, I realized that I couldn't see out of my left eye, and while a small part of me was fretting about some bit of debris that had shredded my eye1 the practical part was running diagnostics. I put a hand to my face and realized my eye was fine. It was just covered in blood. That same practical part, got up, staggered to the side of the road, and, for want of a mirror, took out my phone, took a photo of my face and used that to figure out where the cut was.
This is all to say that Sunday morning, I was cleaning the Raleigh.. While running the chain through a rag that I was holding, a bird had flown by and startled me, causing my left hand to momentarily squeeze the rag and then get dragged backward. And as the teeth of my back gear bit into my thumb, one small part of me was responding to the pain, and the practical part was moving my body to my first aid supplies.
I like to believe that I have a fairly high threshold for pain. I've been burned and sliced and fractured, and I can now add "punctured" to that list. The thing you have to know is that I had gotten complacent. I had been cleaning the bike for the better part of an hour, going on cycles of degreasing and wiping and spraying and wiping and brushing and wiping, and this was the last cycle of applying lubricant to the chain, and my mind was drifting to other plans for that day. The chain was going at a fairly fast clip, so when my hand got caught and dragged into the gears, the gears bit deep. It wasn't just a cut, and there is a reason why gears are said to have teeth.
So, I spent the next ten minutes kneeling next to my sink; staggered by the pain. I was running hot water and soap to clean all of the grease and dirt off the injury area, trying not to think about how dirty the rags or parts were when the accident happened. Then it was swabbing with alcohol and applying pressure to the wound, and realizing that there was still blood dripping into my sink. I turned my thumb over and realized that I had three different punctures because the chain dragged my thumb through three teeth of the rear sprocket.
I have never actually found myself crying because of an injury (at least not since I broke my arm when I was six, but that was more from fear about why my arm wasn't working than pain) but I found myself blinking back some tears when I was putting alcohol on those wounds. Man, they went deep.
So, more cleaning, more alcohol swabbing and then finally a small layer of first aid ointment and a scarf of gauze. Thankfully, the bleeding stopped and I could start typing, because I needed to look up what you should do when you get stabbed by a machine part.
Right. Tetanus.
When silentq and I went to Kilimanjaro, the Travel Clinic at Mt. Auburn gave these nifty WHO immunization booklets that we could use for tracking our vaccines and shots, so that we could prove to various countries that we were, indeed, immunized against yellow fever and malaria and smallpox. I had been using them for the past four years for tracking flu shots, but there was no recent record for a tetanus booster.
So, I ditched my early plans for that morning, brought the bike down and rode to the hospital. Hey, at least the chain was running well now.
At emergency room registration, the orderly asked me how I was doing and I paused and said, "I was fine, but about thirty minutes ago, I got my hand caught in the drivetrain of my bicycle, and my left thumb was gouged by a gear. The wound is cleaned and dressed with a coating of bacitracin, but I don't have clear records of my last tetanus booster and would like one."
"Jesus, you make it sound like you're ordering a pizza. Here fill this out and have a seat over there."
I was seen a few minutes later, by a tiny nurse with salt and pepper hair who called me "Sonny" and when I described the accident to her, she looked up at me and said, "congratulations, that is the grossest thing I've heard this week."
"Slow week?"
"It's Sunday. The week's just getting started, my boy. Don't flatter yourself."
Once she determined that I was not going to die in the next fifteen minutes, she left me in a room to wait for the next emergency physician to come by. I played Sudoku on my phone with my non bloody right hand.
The doctor who arrived was a fellow about my age, who talked quickly and took one look at my dressing and asked, "you did this yourself?"
"yeah, with what I had on hand."
"Not bad, but let's take that off and clean the wound up a little more. What do you do for work? concert pianist? surgeon? do you need this hand?"
"uhh... I work with computers, I need to type."
"oh, that's fine, don't worry. We won't treat you any different. I'm just messin' with you."
Jesus, what's up with the Sunday shift in this hospital?
Regardless, he cleaned the wound with soap and water, applied a fresh dressing to it and shot me up with a tetanus booster and wrote out a prescription for antibiotics. As I headed home, I thought about all of the injuries that I've given myself over the years. Some of them, like the bike crashes, I always acknowledged as an inherent part of risk. I've gotten away with my fair share, but averages say that it would catch up to me eventually, and now, as I'm older I've started to see the wisdom in quitting when I'm ahead of certain outcomes. But then, there's stuff like this that's just stupid negligence, and I can't help but wonder if I'm really missing some level of basic precaution ... like the way people with Asperger's are unable to appropriately interpret social cues, some of us just aren't able to look at a risky situation and fully understand how badly it can all go wrong.
I spent part of this morning, over breakfast, reading this article in Outside about an adventure writer enrolling in a Wilderness First Aid course. It's something that I've been passively interested in, but this is a full on First Responder class that requires ten days in the middle of Wyoming, so you treat it like you would a two week vacation. It's starting to feel kind of compelling.
Epilogue -- after getting home, I carried on with my afternoon plans, which included a Greek Easter party and stopping at a flower shop in Union Square to buy the beginning of an herb garden. I got home as the sun was setting and had started packing for another camping trip that I was planning for this weekend. I have this little metal pop-up candle lantern that I was planning on using, and while trying to pop it open, I wound squeezing something a little too hard and caused all of the components to explode outwards spectacularly. Nothing broke, but as I was trying to reassemble the lantern, I realized that my hands were, once again, covered in blood because one of the metal pieces nicked my finger and caused it to start spurting.
I'd have slammed my face into my kitchen table if not for the fact that I had already clearly lost enough blood that day.
1 since that bike crash, btw, I have been really curious to know what it feels like to put one eye out. I don't actually want to know for myself ... I'd be fine with a realistic graphic fictional descrption somewhere. You know, for future diagnostic purposes.