Pictures of my Stitches

It was 9:40 pm and I was right on schedule to by in bed by 10 pm. Beautiful. The only tasks I had to accomplish were (1) Walk the dog, (2) Do the dishes and (3) Take a shower (if I was feeling exceptionally ambitious).

"I will do the dishes first," I decided, as I was bound to lose interest in them once I walked the dog.

This proved to be a mistake.

I was halfway finished with my domestic engineering duties when the glass in my hand, for no apparent reason, broke in two. "Oh shit," I sighed, as I watched blood escape from a newly formed wound on my hand.

As I am wont to do with most injuries or medical issues, I took a picture and sent it to my nurse friends with the message, "Do you think this needs stitches?" And then waited patiently for an answer.

I decided that this was as good of a time as any to take the dog for his walk. He needed to go to the washroom and I needed to.. Well.. I needed to go to the hospital and didn't want to return to my apartment only to find a pile of dog shit on my dining room (a.k.a. bicycle room) floor. He had already pooped on the floor once that week (long work days + dogs with indigestion = bad things) and I was not keen on a repeat performance. So I slapped a generic bandage on that bad boy and headed outdoors.

People complain about Emergency Room wait times, and I can understand being moody and impatient when you are ill or a loved is ill, but, really, it is not so bad.

Sure... It was a work night and I sat in the ER, waiting, for five hours before I was taken to into an examination room, but Flashdance was playing on the television! It was practically worth cutting my hand open for that alone.

I waited in the examination room for another half of an hour before one of the Emergency Room doctors was able to see me. She was friendly and we made small talk while she tended to my wound. "I am just going to tack that back together," she told me. We'd been discussing the possibility of glueing my wound instead of stitching (please refer to this post to see the awesomeness of glue when it comes to wounds), so I was unsure which option she had decided to go with. I mean, the English major in me knows that "tack" typically refers to a temporary stitch, but it also refers to the quality of being sticky... which super glue is.

Even after she had injected my hand with freezing, I was still not sure which route the lady doctor would take. Perhaps she had an exceptional bedside manner and wanted to ensure my visit to the hospital was as painless as possible, even if she was just going to glue shit back in place. She had mentioned that sometimes glue did not work so well on joints, so, for the sake of my career as a (future) hand model and my reputation as a badass, I was crossing my uninjured fingers for stitches. And it worked!

It was 3:30 am by the time I was bandaged up and ready to go. I decided that I would make a half-hearted attempt to be at work for 9 am the next morning, but that I would realistically opt to sleep in instead. I was going to get sympathy no matter what, so it really didn't matter when I showed up.



The doctor had told me to leave the bandage on until "tomorrow." While at work, I argued with co-workers over when tomorrow was. "You got your stitches at 3 am. This means tomorrow is Friday," they all said. But the more I thought about my bandaged hand, the itchier it got and the more determined I was that Lady Doctor's definition of "tomorrow" was probably flexible.

When I finally took the bandage off of my hand, I was disappointed. It looked pretty wimpy. I mean, yes, of course I was totally badass now with three stitches, but the street cred it gave me was comparable to that which Martha Stewart received when she went to Camp Cupcake. So I made a decision right then and there: from now on, when anybody asked, instead of telling them how I really injured my hand, I would say that I got cut in a knife fight.


Will they believe me? Maybe yes, maybe no (probably no). They do not need to know that "knife fight" is code for doing the dishes. It is none of their business. Plus, I have stitches now. I am badass. People who are badass don't care about stuff like whether or not someone really believes that they were in a knife fight.

New challenge: drunk jogging.

Out of boredom, I have decided to take up drunken jogging. As normal jogging has never really held an interest for me, I feel like drunken jogging will open up a whole new door.

"But Megan," I am sure you are saying to yourself, "you cannot possibly expect to stay drunk throughout your entire run." And that is a good point, but I actually can expect to stay drunk throughout my entire run, and I will tell you how: I will fill my camel pack with amaretto and coke.

Will I vomit? Absolutely. Will it make me a better runner? I am going to have to go with no on this one. But will it make running more interesting? Probably... if only because it will make it that much more difficult to actually do the running in the first place. Will I fall over? Will I veer from one side of the the sidewalk to the other? Who knows, but it is pretty likely. Only time will tell for sure. 

Something to think about...

Every year, upon getting older, I make myself a list of things I hope to accomplish in that year of life. With a little under two months until my next birthday, I have started looking over my list in an attempt to see what else I can reasonably cross off.

If my calculations are correct, I could, in theory, put a line through another six of my goals. That would give me an 80% success rate for goals achieved in the 26th year of my life. I think that is pretty decent when you think about.

I have started thinking about goals for my upcoming year of life. As I will be turning twenty-seven, there will be twenty-seven of them. I am now accepting suggestions from the Internet.