Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Choosing Unwisely

302/366
 *Warning - Gory Story to Follow*

Sunday night, my husband was crazy.   He had been working all weekend on a work project, and had stayed up late  working.  To take a "break" he decided to do a bit of cooking.  We're in this group, Freezer Cooking club, and once a month, we make 8 copies of the same meal, put them in freezer bags or metal tins, have a meeting and swap out.  We end up with 7 different meals, and some to give away to someone who might needing some easy meals.  Lately, since I've been feeling terribly, Eric has taken up the cooking and preparations.  Actually, on top of being a really great cook, he also Enjoys cooking.  Can't say I feel the same way.  So Eric has been doing most of the cooking for Freezer Cooking, then I get to go to the meetings, sit and chat with the gals, hang out, swap the food, and he gets to reap the benefits.  It's a great setup!

Anyway, Sunday night, he was tapping away on his computer, working until midnight, getting tired.  So in an effort to step away for a moment, he thought he'd take a break to do something easy.  This month's dish, was a pretty easy prep for us.  Some months it's extensive, other times it's easy, some months expensive, some months, not so much, but it all evens out in the end.

Imagine, a tired man, puttering around in the kitchen at midnight.  He has been sitting mostly in the dark, so the only light he turns on is the stove light.  He starts pulling out the stash of frozen chicken breasts, placing 4 in each metal tin, which he has lined up across the island.  But he comes to a pair that are frozen together, he only needs one of the two, every tin is full.  So he takes it over to the cutting boards, grabs the butcher knife, which my sister had told us and told us it was dull, and commences to slice....

Where was I?  Oh I'd  gone to bed long before.  Baby #3 exhausts me in the evenings.

Suddenly, I am awakened, Eric's shadow in the doorway, he says, "Hon, I have cut myself and I need your help."  For some reason we went back downstairs.  He was grossing me out by holding his hand in his mouth, such that there was blood all over his face and shirt, I grabbed a mit full of paper towels and slapped them on the oozing wound, located just at the base of this thumb, on the inside by the webbing.  I lifted them, and couldn't see the bottom of the wound.

You'd think I would be a kind, loving wife, but I don't think I stopped yelling at him once we got downstairs.  Yelling about the stupidity of cutting with a dull knife in the dark.  Putting an open wound in his mouth!  I could have started yelling about the amount of bacteria in chicken, blessedly frozen when he was dealing with his wound, but No, he has to go and thaw all that by sticking his filthy bleeding hand in his mouth.  No, I was not a sympathetic kind loving supportive wife.  I'm sorry for that.  But in a Crisis, I am all yelling. It used to be all Business.   But when it comes to my family, I am rarely calm.  At least, I don't burst into hysterical tears until After all is said and done.

Eric started to swoon, so I dragged him into the bathroom, thinking we'd rinse it.  But we never got that far.  He needed to sit on the toilet, but his face went green.  He was telling me what he'd done, trying to pry apart the chicken breasts with the dull knife.  Great Jehosephat!  He says oh so casually as I'm trying to look at the wound, still bleeding profusely, "And I think I got the bone. I felt it bounce." He starts to swoon again.  I make him lay down on the bathroom floor, and try to get him to hold it above his head before passing out.  But when I started to stand up, I felt like I was going to puke.  And pass out.  I had to sit on the bathroom floor too.

What a pair of pretty nothings. He was combining the only two things in the world that I apparently can't stomach when I'm pregnant: raw meat, and blood.   I crawled to my cell phone, and started calling my neighbors.  Someone was going to have to take Eric to the hospital, and it was Clear that neither of us were in any shape to drive.  After no answer, we called my Mother In Law, God Bless Her.  Miraculously, she woke up.  She told me later, Dad heard the phone ring.  That's a Miracle in and of itself, and woke her.  She came running to take Eric to the ER.

Meanwhile, while we waited for Mom, our swoons passed, and I got up and slowly went into the kitchen, Eric was very worried about the knife and the kids.  "Get the knife off the floor!" he kept telling me.  So I did.  Only I couldn't find it.   I saw blood, a lot of it, and started to gag.  I will have you know I found one chicken breast on the floor, and the other on the counter, and managed to throw them away before another nausea spell hit. Then I had to lay down on the kitchen floor.

That passed quickly, and we sat down at the kitchen table.  Eric stood up and was trying to cover the chicken one-handed, I'm like WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! Sit down Maniac!  He didn't want to lose all the meat.  And he knew I wasn't in any place to deal with it.  I finally managed to convince him to sit, JUST in time for Mom to arrive.  12 minutes is a really long time sometimes.

She took him to the ER, leaving me home alone to sit and wait for word.  I knew better than to think that I'd be able to go to sleep.  I decided to clean up the blood.  That was Bad.  I mean, I'm glad I did it and all, but it took me half an hour, interspersed with sessions of gagging and needing to sit and rest, and not look.  It was Ugly.

He's not allowed to be that stupid ever again.  I couldn't handle it.  I used to be of a Strong constitution.  I worked in a hospital, for goodness sake.  I dealt with gross stuff.  I have dealt with more disgusting things coming out of my child than anyone should every have to deal with, and I was OK.  But not anymore.  Can't stomach raw meat (or apparently frozen) or Blood.  At. All.

Even writing this story has taken me a while, because thinking about it makes me gag.  I warned you of the grossness, it was so gross.

So I cleaned up and went to lay down.  I didn't have the strength to pour myself a ginger ale, my hands were too shaky, so I just took my 2 liter into the living room, and had a few sips to calm down.  And I made phone calls, to my sister (who blessedly was still up in TX) and to our friend Ashley, the neighbor who got my message and called back after we got a hold of Mom.  They talked me down.  So I watched some trashy tv, and waited for word from the ER.

Luckily, profuse bleeding in the middle of the night gets you seen real quick.  Eric got right in, got seen.  He told them he doesn't do well with blood, so they laid him down before taking a look.   They did an X-ray to make sure he didn't knick the bone.  He was Lucky he didn't get the tendon either.  Guess the knife did just Bounce off the bone.  Eww.  But he did have to get 4 stitches.  His first.  Later I learned, that not only was this the first time he'd gotten stitches, but he'd only ever inflicted them on others, sending his little brother Ryan to the ER twice.  Ah, Brothers.

But he didn't pass out, they gave him a sh'load of Novacaine shots to make sure he wasn't feeling a thing, so much that it didn't wear off until naptime the next day.  He did well.

He walked in the door at 3:30.  And I hugged him and went to bed, so relieved was I that he was now home safe and sound.

Crazy man stayed up just a little bit longer, and finished preparing the chicken for Freezer Cooking.

But don't worry friends, all the blood was on the other side of the kitchen, he was good and cleaned up before cooking.  We made sure that no bloody chicken or thumbs were made a part of this Duck Soup Chicken.

But it did get me thinking - last month, while he was cooking, I left the tub on and almost drowned the house.  This month, he nearly cuts off his thumb.  I hate to see what will happen next month.

In the mean time, he's just fine now.  

Just wanted to show you that Eric is doing well the next day!  
A little sore, but OK - One Thumbs Up! 

0 comments: