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The Time I Took Off My Foot Bandages
So, this post is going to get a little gross. Nothing too crazy, but if you are of a sensitive disposition, you might just want to go read about dog molestation instead.
Anyway, I finally got my surgical boot and bandages from my bunion surgery removed on Tuesday. Check out the difference between before and after!
Before:
After:
As you can see, I’ve got a nasty gash on the top of my foot, but it’s not too bad, all things considered. However, what WAS bad was trying to wash my foot for the first time in three weeks.
The human body produces a startling amount of dead skin that is normally washed away by sweat, a shower, a bath, friction, etc. My foot had received no such attention, and as such was coated in a quarter-inch thick layer of scum. I didn’t take a picture of my foot before the washing, because it was just too gross.
Calluses which were merely a nuisance before the surgery had morphed into cracked deserts with crevasses large enough to act as tunnels in an ant farm. The surface of my skin was a dull yellow color, both from old Betadine and grime. To my alarm, great chunks of foot began falling off as I scrubbed in the shower. A delicate scratch with a single fingernail released a tectonic plate of dead skin the size of my entire big toe. Each stroke of my loofah made it look like I was leaving genetic breadcrumbs Hansel-and-Gretel style on the bottom of the tub. I hastily collected all the skin in some toilet paper and washed the tub, since I live with roommates and am not a complete heathen.
After about 10 minutes in the shower, the scar cracked open and began to ooze yellowish plasma, followed shortly by heavily congealed blood. I had been avoiding the wound itself as best I could, and to see it spew forth blood like a volcano made me freak out completely. But I kept right on scrubbing the rest of my foot in the midst of my panic, because I’d be damned if I was going to crawl into brand new white sheets while shedding skin faster than a snake.
After a good 25 minutes or so of scrubbing, the deed was finally done. I was bloody and exhausted, but comparatively clean. Luckily, my wound scabbed nicely overnight, and it hasn’t given me a whole lot of trouble since.
But the strange thing is that it still doesn’t feel like my foot. I look at it, and it’s like someone else’s foot has been grafted onto my ankle, then left to fester. When you’re used to seeing an appendage a certain way, and then it suddenly changes, your mind goes all wonky. The fact that some of my toes are still numb from swelling doesn’t help matters. Over the past few days, I’ve tried to get reacquainted with my foot, but it still feels like I’ve got a waxen corpse attached to me. Psychologically, this is pretty upsetting, but I’m hopeful I’ll come around soon. After all, it’s still my body, and I’ll go nuts if I can’t come to terms with that.
Read more:
The Time My Dad Declared War On Deer
My dad has always had issues with the deer that live in our backyard.
Every year, his carefully tended beds sprout, look nice for about one day, then are mercilessly mowed down by a horde of ravenous deer. They clip each tulip and plant neatly with their teeth; it looks as if a scythe has reaped the entire lot. The deer come right up to the house and munch on our flowers while watching us eat breakfast through the windows.
In an effort to save at least a few of his precious plants, my dad has tried just about everything. He hung Irish Spring soap from each branch, which did nothing whatsoever. He began peeing on all the bushes, heading outside several times a day to “water the plants.” The idea is that your are marking your territory with your urine, but the deer didn’t seem to care.
He applied cheesecloth and bird netting to our raspberry bush, which didn’t work for deer OR birds. They actually seemed to work together, with the birds carrying off enough of the netting that the deer could feed more easily. He applied dried blood all over the place, which was supposed to scare off the deer. You can buy this blood meal at any hardware store, but what IS IT? Cow? The blood of virgins? The label does not say.
Obviously, this didn’t work either.
He strung up fishing line attached to poles, which were supposed to keep the deers’ long legs from marching around willy-nilly. But he didn’t build this fence tall enough, and the deer simply grazed over the top of the boundary.
The deer would walk over our frozen swimming pool in winter, and their sharp hooves would tear holes in the cover, which meant we had to buy a new one every year. My dad got worried that a deer would eventually break through the ice and drown in our pool, so he installed a super-tough cover at great expense.
Our dog Lily, a 75-pound golden retriever, was terrified of the deer, and so was no help. My dad would sometimes let her out anyway when the deer were around, in the hopes the deer would bolt, but Lily would just stay at the door, whining and pawing to be let back in. He then went out himself, armed with rocks, but the deer were completely unimpressed. I imagine they were actually laughing in their tiny deery heads.
My dad has since given up, and simply refuses to plant anything anymore. Annual bulbs still sprout, and are cut down before they can even bloom. Most of our landscaping near the house has been removed so that the deer at least keep their distance. This is a battle we realized we simply couldn’t win.
However, he is still fighting the good fight against the moles in our yard. Back when I was living at home, he would proudly show me the corpse whenever he caught one in a trap. The mole’s pinched face was barely visible behind it’s comically oversized paws, and its midsection was, of course, squished into a bloody pulp by the trap. Lovely.
The Time I Performed Home Surgery
So, this was back in 2009 when I was unemployed and dubiously insured.
I noticed this sort of weird mole-like thing on my inner right thigh, and freaked the hell out. The thing was grotesquely shaped and seemed to grow larger weekly, eventually protruding a good quarter of an inch from my leg.
I figured I had some sort of skin cancer, and sent a blurry camera phone photo to my dad, who is a doctor. He told me to quit worrying, and that it was just a skin tag.
I had never heard of a skin tag before, but apparently it’s just a small benign growth that often appears in places where layers of skin rub against each other. Common locations include the your neck, armpits, eyelids, under the breasts, or the spot where your thighs touch (as in my case).
Though they aren’t dangerous, I thought it was pretty unsightly, and decided to get rid of it. However, my insurance was useful only in catastrophic situations, and I was not interested in paying hundreds of dollars for a doctor to snip it off. My dad recommended that I tie thread or thin, waxed dental floss around the base of the growth, and knot it tightly. By cutting off the blood supply, the tumor should eventually dry up and fall off on its own.
However, after two days with floss dangling between my legs, the skin tag was purple, but still very firmly attached. Evidently I had not cut off the blood supply completely, or at least not to the entire mass.
It was time for plan B.
Plan B involved rubbing the area with alcohol, sterilizing a pair of nail or toenail clippers, and just chopping it off. After reading a few articles describing the procedure, I felt like I was ready.
But when the time came, I found myself paralyzed with fear. I held the clippers menacingly in my left hand while the other clutched at my thigh, but I couldn’t seem to get the two to meet. Each time my left hand approached, my thigh scooted off to the right of its own accord, causing me to spin in sad, naked circles.
I took a deep breathe, sterilized everything AGAIN just in case, then sat myself down on the toilet lid so that I’d stop revolving like a top. Even once the clippers were poised around the tag, I still had to give myself a pep talk for a good five minutes before I finally made the snip.
And it really wasn’t bad at all. It stung terribly for a second, bled slightly, and it was all over. After the application of a Band-Aid, it was if nothing had happened at all. Now, all I have is a small scar to mark the spot, and the tag has never recurred.
So if you’ve got a troublesome skin tag, just grit your teeth and chop that damn thing off. You’ll be glad you did, and hopefully you won’t be as wussy as I was about it all.
The Time I Watched Forensic Files
So I am really into forensic science. I’ve been plowing my way through Forensic Files episodes, of which there are many. The show started in 1996, and it details the detective work and forensic testing that goes into solving a variety of crimes, mostly murders. As a morbid individual, I find this sort of stuff endlessly fascinating, though my roommates are both concerned with and alarmed by my preoccupation with crime. In college, I bought a book about serial killers and left it conspicuously on the coffee table. I suppose I hoped it would spark conversation, but it mostly just made guests back slowly out the door.
But you really do learn some cool things while watching this show. For instance, a body, mostly decomposed, was determined to be a drowning victim due to the dried-out diatoms residing in what remained of her lung tissue. These little bits of algae were enough to show that she had indeed drowned, and the species of diatom even helped determine in which body of water she had been originally dumped.
One of the most interesting episodes I’ve seen so far has been the case of Dr. John Schneeberger. People these days trust implicitly the validity of DNA tests, and when Dr. Schneeberger successfully passed not one, but three such tests, he was judged to be completely innocent. But his accuser and victim, who maintained that he had drugged and raped her at the hospital, was adamant. She fought the results of the tests for seven years, until his deceit was finally discovered. He had managed to foil the DNA tests by implanting the blood, and therefore DNA, of another person within his arm. He always insisted that the blood for the DNA tests be drawn from only his left forearm, where he had hidden a tiny vial beneath his skin that contained the blood of another man, combined with anticoagulants to fool the technicians. Witnesses present during the time that the doctor’s blood was drawn testified that they saw the needle pierce his skin, which was absolutely true. However, it was what was beneath that skin that fooled investigators for so many years. After his trial, Dr. Schneeberger only served four years of his sentence before being released and deported from Canada to his native South Africa.
The show reveals the importance of footprints, the power of saliva in cigarette butts, methods for lifting fingerprints off non-porous substances (hint: it involves Super Glue), and the scientific revolution that was PCR. Forensic anthropology, as detailed in the fascinating book Death’s Acre, allows scientists to identify a body decades, and sometimes centuries, after death. The Body Farm, located near the University of Tennessee Medical Center, is a research facility that tracks and quantifies the process of human decomposition. Bodies are studied in countless scenarios, including buried, underwater, or simply left to the elements. Such research has proved invaluable in the quest to rapidly and accurately identify the time of death in a homicide. Also, cops are apparently permitted to lie a LOT when pressuring a suspect for a confession. You’re allowed to say you have whatever evidence against them that you want, but can’t say that if they don’t confess, they’ll be put to death. Eeks.
Anyway, you really should watch this show on TruTV. Reruns are on constantly, so go ahead and learn a little something. Who knows, maybe the knowledge you gain will allow you to commit the perfect crime one day. Though having watched the show for years, I doubt the “perfect crime” even exists. Even without a body, you can still be convicted. As the great animation Something Left, Something Taken illustrates, forensic science relies on the assumption that in every interaction, you either leave something behind, or take something with you, or both. A telltale carpet fiber on your coat, or a single hair of your pet dog left at the crime scene, can connect you intrinsically to a bloody murder. Even an angled speck of blood spatter on your shirt can reveal that you were present while blood was actively flowing, instead of merely touching the body after the fact. We can’t all kill amongst plastic sheeting like Dexter, after all, so forensic science will remain a powerful investigative tool for years to come.
The Time My Nose Bled
My nose will bleed at the slightest provocation.
I don’t know whether the skin inside my nose is just unusually thin or WHAT, but the arrival of winter always means blood everywhere.
On my pillows when I wake up, flowing from my face in the shower, in each and every tissue — it simply doesn’t matter. Nose bleeds, like the honey badger, just don’t care.
But dry air is not my only enemy. Even a glancing blow to an area merely resembling my nose will cause it to start gushing like a waterfall. I was always that girl in gym class who somehow managed to get a bloody nose every damn time. I’ve been maimed by errant soccer balls, field hockey sticks, and footballs. If it has the capability to get airborn in the confines of a high school gym, then it’s hit me in the face. I’d sit on the bleachers, dribbling blood onto my gym outfit as the rest of the class continued playing tennis or handball or whatever the fuck they did. While my life essence pooled onto the waxed floor.
Heathens, the lot of them!
Anyway, I remember one particularly horrible nose bleed experience. It was several years ago, and my nose had decided to start leaking because, you know, why the hell not? I was just brushing my teeth before bed, minding my own business, when a lazy trail of blood splattered into the sink. Before I knew it, the trickle had turned into a flood, and I used half a roll of toilet paper just to stem the tide. The flow had finally stopped, but I’d be damned if I was going to go to sleep with a nostril full of clotted blood.
I gingerly tried to clean the area with warm water, but the damage was simply too severe. In the course of my probings with toilet paper, I noticed a red slug-like tendril poking shyly out of my nostril. In horror, I dabbed at it with my tissue, and gave an experimental yank.
It felt like I had just torn away a piece of my soul.
The rush of blood was instantaneous and terrifying. It was like someone had hooked a garden hose from hell to my nose, then thrown the taps open. Blood spattered everywhere, turning my pink girlish bathroom into a gruesome crime scene. I fumbled for the toilet paper, thrusting an entire roll against my face in a desperate effort to keep myself from bleeding out.
Apparently, that little strand of blood I had pulled on was the entire original clot. The tentacle was several inches long, and once removed, the blood flowed anew, and even worse than before.
The bleeding eventually slowed, and I decided to just go to bed, crusty bloody nostrils or not. My face was pale, and my hands were shaking, but I figured I wasn’t at actual risk of dying.
If you, like me, suffer from frequent nosebleeds, take note. A few sprays of Afrin (or its generic equivalent) will stop the blood in its tracks. The nasal spray constricts the blood vessels in your nose, which reduces swelling and seals off the ends of any ruptured vessels. But take care not to use it too often, or else risk the dreaded rebound congestion. But a spray once in a while to stop an out of control nosebleed should be fine.
UPDATE:
A physiological explanation from my mom:
FYI, the reason the nose bleeds so well is because of an area on the nasal septum called Kiesselbach’s Plexus. It is an area which is fed by the anterior ethmoid artery, the splenopalatine artery, the greater palatine artery and the septal branch of the labial artery. All these arterial branches come together to form the aforementioned Kiesselbach’s Plexus. They anastomose in this area, meaning they come together to form a sort of ball of arteries. When a nose bleed happens, this Plexus becomes involved and in some unfortunate folks this area is very friable, or easily torn. When a nosebleed comes into the ER, the very first thing to do is to give three squirts of Afrin x 5. Also filling a latex glove with ice in the fingers of it and placing it across the nasal septum helps to clot the blood. If the Afrin doesn’t work and the nose continues to bleed, then cautery of the Plexus happens – not a pleasant thing to participate in. Then the ENT or whoever sticks a balloon thingie up there and inflates it to keep constant pressure on the Plexus. Just thought you’d like to know. Usually this type of nosebleed involves young men for some unexplained reason.
The Time My Brother Pierced His Own Ear
When my brother was in 8th grade, all he wanted was to have his ear pierced, but my mom said that he was too young. Undaunted, he decided to take matters into his own hands. His own shaky, clammy hands.
As detailed previously, my brother has some problems with blood. Namely, that it makes him swoon like a Victorian girl with the vapors. Even knowing this, his desire for an ear stud was so powerful that he was willing to risk fainting, and possibly peeing himself, to get one. Why was he so determined? Well, in my brother’s words:
There was a guy who was in a juvenile offender’s home, but came to our school during the day for classes. And he had his ear pierced (just one – the left). He did it himself, which was easy to imagine, because he was made of good, firm, criminal stuff. Anyway, he was cool, had reportedly had sex any number of times, and had been arrested more than that.
My brother would have done anything to gain such notoriety.
So he waited until my parents had left on some errand, then took one of my dad’s 27-gauge allergy needles and set to work. Now, allergy needles are absurdly thin, so a hole made with one wouldn’t even accommodate an earring, but I don’t think he was thinking logically at the time.
He headed outside to the deck, perhaps hoping that the cool air would help steel his nerves. He took a deep breath, plunged the needle into his earlobe, and instantly fainted. He woke up with his mouth full of sand, and realized he had fallen head-first into a sandbox beneath the deck. He had somehow managed to slump in between the railings on the deck, slithering down unconscious to the level below. His face was scraped up, his ear was bleeding, and his jaw felt sore. An inspection of his mouth revealed that he had a massive chip in his front tooth.
Knowing that my parents would be home soon, he sprang to his feet and tried to clean himself up a bit. But when they arrived, his disheveled appearance was fooling no one. He insisted that nothing had happened, but the huge gap in his smile begged to differ.
My parents finally wrangled the whole embarrassing story out of him, and later my mom took him to the mall to get his ears pierced for real. She figured that if he was willing to stab himself, then there was nothing she could do to stop him.
The Time I Did Community Service – Planting Carrots
A short time after my reading to the blind fiasco, my mom got a packet in the mail from the United Way.
Inside were phone numbers for various volunteer organizations, though when we began to dial, we discovered the packet was woefully out of date. Most calls went to disconnected numbers, or completely unrelated companies. Many had gone out of business, never to be heard from again. So it was exciting to finally find a human being at the end of the line, even if it sounded like we had woken her up. At 3 pm.
Her “organization” was called something like “Fighting for Animal Welfare,” but it soon became clear that the group had disbanded several years before. But she was old, and had an overrun garden, so would I mind terribly coming over and tending to her carrots?
I argued with my mom that this was not actually community service – this was just helping a single woman. Wasn’t my service supposed to benefit the whole community at large? But I was overruled, and my mom arranged for me to show up that weekend.
I was still too young to drive, so my mom shuttled me over to the opposite end of town, passing by projects and burnt out churches on our way to this lady’s house. “Just be nice and SMILE, for Christ’s sake,” my mom urged, hoping that I wouldn’t run screaming from this opportunity, at least.
She dropped me off in a nondescript driveway, then sped off, promising to be back in two hours or so. Alone, I hesitantly rapped at the woman’s screen door. I heard a violent burst of coughing come from within the dim house, followed by a guttural spitting noise. An ancient-looking woman emerged from the darkness, supporting herself on a cane and covered in at least three layers of clothing.
“Come on in,” she croaked, “and don’t let the cats out.” Each cat was named after a different racial slur, which was charming. I pet “Wetback” uneasily as she settled back into an armchair that had shaped itself to her sagging body.
“I got a pretty overgrown garden back there, so there’s a lot of work to do. You might be wondering about all these clothes I’m wearing.” I nodded warily, eyeing the exit in case she decided to start stripping. “I’ve got all this on since I’m deathly allergic to bees, and they are just EVERYWHERE back there. I think there’s a hive, but I’m not sure…” She trailed off into another prolonged hacking session, which she wrapped up by spitting into a bowl she kept by her armchair. “Do you know what an EpiPen is?”
Indeed I did, if only because my brother is allergic to everything on earth. Essentially, it’s a compact spring-loaded syringe that injects epinephrine straight into a patient suffering from a severe allergic reaction. Remember that scene from Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman’s character is overdosing, and they stab adrenaline straight into her heart? It’s kind of like that.
She gestured to her thigh with hands that were covered in 3+ pairs of gloves. “This is where you’ll need to aim if I get stung, okay?” And without further ado, she hobbled off to the back door, nudging “Kike” out of the way with her foot. I meekly followed, wondering if one of her neighbors would take me in if I started pounding on their door.
In moments, we had arrived at the garden. It was surrounded by a rusty chainlink fence, and calling it “overgrown” was an understatement. Briars tangled everywhere, choking the tiny rose bush that must have been planted well over a decade ago. She pointed to various plants, giving me their scientific names, then finally shuffled over to the carrot patch. Which looked just like the rest of the garden, and had bees buzzing angrily in the vicinity.
“Yeah, this is where I want to put them. You’ll have to clear out all these other plants, though.”
The other plants in question were thick, thorny vines that had inexplicably been coated in six inches of manure. The stench on a hot summer’s day was overpowering, and I wrinkled my nose with distaste. The woman caught my expression, and warned me not to be so “uppity.” She told me to set to work, but mentioned that she couldn’t spare a pair of gloves. “I need them all to protect myself from the bees.”
She had me set up a lawn chair so she could watch me work, and I began to dig amongst the manure with my bare hands. The thorns pricked my skin every time I grabbed for a briar, but without gloves, I had no choice. Soon my hands were covered in blood and cow shit, and sweat was pouring down my face. The woman began asking me questions about my eating habits. I revealed that I ate meat, and her face became so red and puffy that I thought maybe she had been stung by a bee without me noticing.
“How could you eat poor defenseless animals?!” She wrenched herself from her seat, and huffed back into the house. I kept digging, hoping against hope that somehow two hours had already passed. She came back a few minutes later, and thrust into my face graphic pictures of animals being tortured and butchered. “This is what your diet has caused! All this suffering!” She rambled on like this for the next hour or so, comparing me to Hitler during the Holocaust. I wondered how “Kike” the cat would react to all of this, but he was safe within the confines of the house.
I finally cleared away all the brambles and weeds, and she handed me a tiny packet of carrot seeds. I was to plant them into shallow troughs, then water them. That seemed simple enough, and I was starting to get hopeful that I would soon be out of the hot sun. I dropped the seeds into the furrows, but then realized that there was no hose. Or a watering can. Or even a bucket. How was I supposed to water these?
The woman had an answer. She disappeared outside the chainlink fence for a time, and I began to worry that she was going to make me pee on the carrots or something. But I eventually heard a shout, and the next thing I knew, I was completely soaked with freezing cold water. She had gotten hold of a hose that was attached to the side of the house, then had turned the thing on full blast and aimed the stream so it would go over the 6-foot fence and into the garden. The water had hit right on top of my head, and I could hear her screaming at me to tell her when the water hit the carrots. I directed her over to the patch, and my troughs were instantly overflowing with water, with seeds floating away towards the bees. I yelled at her to stop, but decided to keep the escape of the seeds to myself.
By the time she came back into the garden, the water had soaked into the earth, and everything appeared fine. I was ushered inside, but told not to sit on anything since I was still dripping with water.
She was trying to convince me to play the keyboard during an animal rights parade when I heard a car finally pull into the driveway. I lept over a meowing “Spic” in my eagerness to climb into the car, and that’s how my mom found me. Soaking wet, my hands covered in blood and shit, and an unmistakable look of fear and desperation in my eyes.
She thanked the woman from the rolled-down car window, then screeched off. “What in God’s name happened to you?” I relayed the story, and it was decided that we would no longer use the United Way packet for volunteer opportunities.
The Time My Brother Grew a Second Asshole
The entry today is so gross and horrifying that I’ve decided to use a picture of a cute puppy here. If you start feeling ill, just scroll back up and check out this little guy. Aww.
Things were going swimmingly for my brother up until the day his ass started to burn with the fury of a thousand suns.
A loving wife, a beautiful daughter, and a steady, well-paying acting job – all of these things were no match for an anal fistula.
Basically, if you strain too much while pooping, your anus can start to bulge where it’s not supposed to go. Given enough time, this extra pathway from your anus will reach all the way through your muscle until it reaches the outside. Suddenly, one day you wake up with an extra asshole that is inflamed, infected, and never heals since it’s constantly getting shit in it. Literal shit.
So not only do you have a painful second asshole, but because this little tract lacks the muscle control of your original sphincter, it leaks uncontrollably all the time. Every pair of underwear you own will become skid mark city, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. My brother can now fart through two separate holes.
He went to see a surgeon in Las Vegas, and was scheduled for a procedure that involves essentially coring the fistula like an apple. By removing the infected tissue, it’s hoped that the body will actually start to heal itself. The day of the surgery, my brother started weeping copiously at the thought of being violated so thoroughly. He faints at the sight of blood, so the thought of being impaled anally like a puppet was just too much to take. His heart rate spiked so high that a sedative was immediately pumped into his IV, and he remembers no more.
He woke up with his ass packed so tight with gauze that it looked like he’d been reamed by a torpedo. Everything was still numb, and my brother sucked down one of the opiate pills he had been given for pain, so all was well. But later that night began a grueling two-week span of unimaginable pain. Pissing and shitting could only be accomplished while squatting in warm water, which meant essentially bathing in your own waste after crapping in the tub.
When the gauze finally emerged, well, I’ll let my brother explain in his own words:
Turns out, it was a rolled up sheet of something gelatinous, the size of a Kleenex that unfurled into the water like a shit and blood-stained surrender flag. I got out of the tub, walked to the bedroom and passed out on the carpet.
Things weren’t getting any better, so my brother went back to the surgeon, and it was revealed that the doctor was too “conservative,” and didn’t cut the fistula all away. A cauterization (ie. sticking a hot poker up someone’s asshole) was recommended. The area was numbed slightly, then a white-hot probe was jammed up there. The room filled with the stench of burning flesh and shit. My brother begged for more anesthetic, but unfortunately, the doctor was fresh out.
The pain didn’t recede at all, and two weeks later, he was back in the surgeon’s office. This time, the doctor tried to pour acid into his anus. I’m starting to believe this guy wasn’t a doctor at all, but rather some dude with a foreign-body anal fetish. After the acid treatment, my brother was declared “cured” and shoved out into the hallway.
He still has two anuses. Doctors have said he will always have two anuses. This is just his life now.
The Time I Stabbed Myself (Part 1)
I wish this had happened longer ago than just a year. It’s such a story of stupidity that it’s difficult to grasp that I was 26 rather than 16.
I was in Las Vegas visiting my brother last summer. He was acting in one of the shows on the Strip, and we hung out at his house and generally had a grand old time. I’d tag along to the Strip while he performed in his show, wandering around from casino to casino, and playing penny slots because I am the cheapest being on Earth.
I actually had a strategy for maximizing my free drinks at the casinos. At the penny slots, only pay one cent at a time, but sit next to someone who is a chain smoker. 99% of the time, that smoker is also going to be a heavy drinker who tips the cocktail waitresses well. Park yourself next to them, and if you can ignore the clouds of smoke, you’ll see waitresses practically fall over themselves to serve them (and by extension, YOU). Reeking of smoke, but happily drunk for only pennies, I’d while away the hours. My brother would then pick my drunk ass up and drive me home. Good times!
During this painfully hot August trip to Vegas, we saw billboards advertising the LAS VEGAS GUNSHOW, in all caps. At first we joked about it, wondering the types of people who would attend such a thing. But after I shot an uzi at a store near the Strip (all you need is a driver’s license!), I started getting curious. I had never been to a gun show before – would we be the only liberals present? Would somebody start shooting? The possibilities were endless! We decided to go check it out during my final weekend in Vegas.
Upon handing over $10 at the door, we entered the show and marveled. Guns were absolutely everywhere, along with survival gear and scantily clad women who acted as “booth babes” for the sparsely attended show. One tried to demonstrate the “power” of a magnetic balancing bracelet on me – the “before” example had her practically knocking me over, while the “after” one, with the bracelet, had her barely touching me. I called her out on her chicanery, and she asked me to leave the booth.
I picked up some reusable chemical hand warmers for the New York winter ahead, and also browsed the powdered meals which took up the entire rear of the show. These were emergency rations for the apocalypse, and they were handing out samples. Hungry and intrigued, I took a taste, and let me tell you, I’d rather die in a nuclear winter than eat that shit again. Once again, I was shooed from the booth.
Exiled from approximately half the show, I headed on to the main event, which were the guns and knives. Every table tried to hand me a pink handgun, “For the little lady,” each burly man behind the counter said with a wink. Ugh. I tried sighting some of the larger revolvers, but who was I kidding? At 5 foot nothing and 95 pounds, the recoil alone would knock me on my ass. But I refused to touch anything pink with HEARTS (yes, there was a gun like this), so I also looked at the tiny pistols designed to carry in your purse. Tiny enough to be shot by a child, I found them pretty unnerving. A man at a table full of shotguns recommended that I just use a flashlight to scare a robber instead. Actually shooting a shotgun at close range indoors would destroy much of the room, and he stressed that because of the difficulty of aiming the damn thing, shotguns were mostly just to scare people anyway.
After it was all done, I was a little disappointed to come away with nothing but hand warmers, and so lingered by the knife cabinet. Inside were about a dozen varieties of butterfly knife for prices ranging from $15 to over $100. I had seen my brother do flipping tricks with a similar knife years ago, and wanted to learn for myself. Cheap as I was, I felt a little ridiculous getting the $15 knife, so I sprung for a $20 model – the second cheapest in the case. Excited to try out my new toy, we headed home.
My brother had to work at the theater all day since he had both a matinee and an evening performance, so I decided to stay home and learn my way around this new knife. Alone. I looked up some videos of flipping tricks on YouTube, and attempted to follow the tutorials closely. I began very slow and cautious, but wasn’t too worried since the knife wasn’t particularly sharp. Lord knows how long it had been lying in that cabinet at the show, but it was dull and not particularly clean.
I was doing pretty well for a while, when I decided to try and speed things up, and I got overconfident. While spinning the blade around my hand, I miscalculated and lost my grip on the knife. It spun around in the air, then planted itself tip-first straight into my palm. The edge might had been dull, but the tip was plenty sharp enough to cut through my flesh like butter.
I gave a gasp of pain as the bloody knife clattered to the floor, then nearly passed out. The pain was incredibly intense, and I immediately started cursing until I ran out of words. I knew I was in deep shit since my ring finger and a portion of my palm had gone instantly numb. I grabbed a paper towel, then collapsed onto a nearby couch, trying to fight off the blackness creeping around the edges of my vision. I held my hand above my head, applying as much pressure as I could while I watched the towel turn red at an alarming rate.
Freaked out beyond all reason, I frantically called my brother, but he was on stage and nowhere near his cell phone. I considered calling 911, but chickened out when I thought of the cost of an ambulance. Resigning myself to the inevitable, I called my parents. With a doctor and an ER nurse at my disposal, I figured if anyone would know what to do, it would be them.
“So, uh, hi,” I began, my voice high-pitched and breathless. I was attempting to wedge the cell phone between my face and my shoulder while holding my throbbing hand a foot above my head. “So, uh, I kind of maybe stabbed myself. And I can’t feel part of my hand.” My parents were, understandably, ALARMED. They first asked HOW it had happened, and I panicked. I didn’t want to tell the truth. Who wants to hear that their child bought a knife at a sketchy gun show in the desert, then STABBED herself with it? I hastily concocted a story about about a cooking accident, which my parents accepted without much scrutiny since I was, you know, bleeding to death.
My mom told me to wash out the wound, which I attempted to do for about half a second before I thought I would faint. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “In the hospital, we usually have to hold people down for that part. You probably have an exposed nerve in your hand.” Indeed I did, as I would later find out.
But the bleeding eventually stopped, my brother came home after his day at the theater, and we headed to the nearest pharmacy to get myself a tetanus shot. Without knowing where that blade had come from, I was taking no chances with lockjaw. My dad even called in an antibiotic for me to start taking right away.
As for what happened next, I will leave that for later. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of “Playing With Knives Is a Terrible Fucking Idea!”
(Click here to read Part 2 of the stabbing saga!)
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