Calling in sick wouldn't have hurt this much

Those of you who have read most of my blog posts on working at my coffee shop job know that I've been burned more times than I can count, I've slipped on water and bruised my back and elbow, and dropped a number of things on several of my toes.

But I've never had to head to the emergency room... until yesterday.

All the signs were there to have prevented the accident. A colleague, Hansen, told me that he planned on taking care of the chore that I was doing when it happened, but I ignored him and went ahead and did it anyway. As a joke then, he handed me the box cutter without the blade, which I then put right back in to begin hacking away at the boxes of cups, lids, etc. Big mistake.

Then, while wildly weilding the box cutter, I started joking around with another colleague, Socrates, while looking over my shoulder. As in I was NOT LOOKING AT WHAT THE HELL I WAS DOING.

Here is the part of the story where I say the accident REALLY didn't need to happen. But it did. I started slicing the flaps off a tall box, missed the box about halfway through, and continued to slice right through the base of my thumb.

At first, I just looked at my thumb because it didn't register that I hurt myself that badly. As I watched the blood pour out, I remember being surprised that it didn't hurt more.

So I ran to the handwashing sink in the back and thrust it under running water. That was my first instinct: to wash the blood away. Instead, the water just poured into the wound and flushed out more blood. Genius.

Luckily, yet another colleague, Amanda, was back there who was brave enough to assess the damage for me. So I pulled it out from under the water so we could get a better look at it, and immediately regretted that decision. For the half a second that there was no blood and we moved the skin to see how deep the cut was, I saw that I could actually see INTO the base of my thumb. Her first words? "Erika, seriously, you need to go to the emergency room."

My response (because I was still in shock and starting to feel queasy and hot): "You really think I need to?"

Her response, while handing me paper towels and shoving me toward the door: "GO!"

On the way, I showed my thumb to the coffee shop manager, who will soon be going to school to be a nurse. She took one look, closed her eyes, and winced. That's when I started to get scared. She's going to be a nurse and didn't even want to take a second look at it!

Another colleague who was off work for the day took one look at me and thankfully asked if I wanted her to go with me. I will forever be thankful to Camille for everything she did for me, starting with simply just walking with me across the street toward the big sign that says "Emergency." (Luckily, the coffee shop is seriously a stone's throw away from the hospital.)

And if that wasn't enough, I had no idea what to do when we got there. No one seemed to care that I was literally putting pressure on the tip of my thumb to hold the meat and skin to where it should have been beneath a blood-soaked paper towel.

Camille took charge and started asking every official-looking person what we needed to do. Their response? "Have a seat." And no, that didn't mean "Have a seat where we can get someone out here to take care of your thumb." It literally meant "We're going to do nothing and you will wait until it's your turn."

Now I can understand the "wait your turn" concept. It's very helpful at the bank or the grocery store, but I seriously didn't think it applied to my situation at the hospital. I was BLEEDING in the waiting room. Why did they turn their attention to the guy who was there for an x-ray before me? I obviously would have fully understood if they took care of a gunshot victim or someone who was having trouble breathing before me.

So it was again Camille who went to ask when they planned on taking care of me and also to ask for something more sterile than a rough paper towel to hold over my wound.

When all was said and done, I waited about 10 minutes while trying to hold back tears because I

was not looking forward to the inevitable getting poked and sewn back up like a button that's fallen off a pair of pants.

Finally, they took me back to ask for my name, birthdate, medications I was on, etc., and asked if I was OK because then I actually started crying. It didn't hurt that much - I told her only a 2 or a 3 on the pain scale of 1-10 - I was just honestly nervous and scared.

Knock on wood, but I have been lucky throughout my 26 years when it comes to getting hurt. I've never been in a car accident, never had surgery, and have only had stitches one other time - when I was 5 and my brother swung a croquet mallet, missed the croquet ball, and slammed the mallet into my temple. It was a complete accident, and he felt really bad. And while I remember that day vividly, I don't remember being as scared as I was yesterday. That's probably because I never looked at the wound in the mirror. My mom told me later that it took all she had to keep herself composed because she had to see it.

So my mistake was actually looking at my thumb yesterday - I didn't feel physically sick until I saw what I did to myself. And that feeling didn't go away when the triage nurse told me to expect to be in the hospital for another few HOURS. Let me reiterate that I was BLEEDING, scared, nervous, warm, and feeling sick to my stomache.

So as Camille went back to report the news to the coffee shop manager, the hospital staff sent me to the window of another waiting room. I think they took pity on me there because by that time I was not very successfully holding back tears. I was quickly ushered into a room and told to sit down and put my hand on a tray. The first nurse that came in measured the wound (almost 2 centimeters long) said she thought she "saw white." Apparently, that's bad. I don't know if she was referring to bone or what. All I know is that it made me feel worse.

Then, since I have no idea when my last tetanus shot was, they had to give me that shot in the arm. The bad news is that now, 24 hours after the shot, my arm still hurts. The good news was that when all was said and done, that was the absolute worst part of my time in the emergency room.

The second nurse, Mindy, who came in didn't see white, so good news! That meant that all she had to do was numb the skin around the wound - with a needle, of course - and sew the top part of my thumb back together. That's what I was most nervous about - putting more sharp things near my already painful wound, so I told her that I needed to lie down. She said she expected that!

But it wasn't as bad as I thought. The numbing part happened right away, so all I felt was pressure when she started sewing. Weirdly enough, it sounded like she was sewing through a hunk of charred steak, when it was actually my skin. Yuck! Six stitches later, unlike poor Humpty Dumpty, my thumb was put back together again.

Afterwards, I needed to fill out more paperwork so I could file for workman's comp and was told I needed to take two days off work. Since I was already scheduled to have today off, all that cutting through my thumb got me was a few hours off work. Calling in sick would have been much less painful!