As if it weren't already the story-of-a-lifetime that my veterinarian husband once stitched up his own leg in the bathtub after slicing it WAY open with a chainsaw, he recently had an encore performance that arguably surpasses the Chainsaw Massacre. I'm considering calling this one Attack of the Killer Dresser.
We were in California, engaging in what one would think to be the quaint family tradition of helping prepare a nursery for our next grandchild. I was refinishing a chandelier and applying wall appliques, and Jim was putting together furniture. He had already assembled the crib and was working on the dresser, when our plans took a sudden detour.
My pregnant daughter and I had gone upstairs for a moment, when we heard a heeeeeuge crash.
"Are you okay?" I called down to Jim.
"NO!" he roared back, sounding more irritated than hurt.
So I asked again, to hedge my bets against the possibility of breaking my neck tearing down the wooden steps unnecessarily. After all, he did just sound exceptionally ticked-off, which is often his tone during situations where assembly is required.
"NO!!!" he yelled again, more pissily than ever.
So I tore down the steps, and despite yelling back at my gestating daughter not to run, she did, too. Dumb kid. What we found in the nursery, amid what the CSI's would term "blood spatter," was a highly-agitated Jim, on the floor, holding his knee.
If you've ever put together IKEA furniture, you know that the contemporary styling lends a certain aggressive, razor-sharpness to the edges of its wood (particle-board?) pieces. My husband has similar edges when he's in assembly mode. He is a hard-driven, top-speed, high-performance machine; so much so that he becomes -- well, a bit unaware of his surroundings. It's one of the things I love about him, that laser-focused sense of purpose. He's a dynamo. He gets things done. He da Man.
So there sat my wounded warrior, spurting more than blood ... things I really didn't want to see OR hear. From his expletive-enhanced explanation, we gleaned that he had been moving quickly, a la Jim, and tripped over some boards he had propped up, falling into some other boards, breaking them and cutting open his leg in two places.
[Warning: The follwing statements may be inappropriate for lily-livered audiences.] I don't want to make you queasy or anything, but there was more than blood. There were two big, thick flaps of loose tissue and even a glimpse of bone.
Vicious, vicious furniture.
What ensued was a lot of debate about what to do next. Mind you, Jim's expertise is in veterinary surgery, and he has sewn up more gruesome horse lacerations than you can shake a barbed-wire fence at. Of course, it was after hours for people-doctor offices, and we called a few area vets who refused to sell some crazy practitioner from the Midwest a surgical pack with needles and suture. (After all, we were in California, where rules are rules, and they are required, by law, to ecshew all sense of logic or compassion.)
So we decided to sew up his flappy leg with a regular sewing needle, needle-nose pliers and dental floss.
And he did, with me as his surgical assistant, pouring copious amounts of rubbing alcohol on everything within five feet of him. Sure, every once in a while a needle or the floss broke, but my expert veterinary surgeon eventually closed the two gaping wounds with about twenty stitches fit for even the highest-bred Arabian stallion.
What a stud.
Upon hearing about the fiasco, my other daughter -- the non-pregnant (at least to my knowledge) one -- said she was pretty sure her concept of masculinity was significantly skewed. I think she's right.
Two weeks later, Jim removed the stitches of a nearly-healed, not-too-bad-looking wound. And though he isn't terribly marred, his modeling career is effectively over. No doubt he'll manage to muddle through.
As for the rest of us, we have a new chapter for our growing volume of Dittoes' Believe-it-or-Not.
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