9/06/2007

That should be their new slogan

I super-glued my toe shut.
I had a deep slice that looked as though I'd attempted to remove my own baby toe and instead of getting stitches I decided to super-glue it shut.
I'd gotten up to use the bathroom at around five in the morning only to ram right into a street sign I had borrowed from the city. "Fuck!" I exclaimed, and avoided looking down for as long as possible. When I did, look down that is, I noticed that there was blood flowing liberally from a superficial wound on the top of my smallest toe. I thought it odd that a relatively shallow cut would produce so much blood, but shrugged my shoulders and sought out my first aid kit without giving it much more thought.
I hopped around the basement floor in an attempt to avoid leaving a trail of bodily fluids behind me, but failed miserably. Once I reached the laundry room sink, I propped my foot up on the counter to give my wound a closer examination. It is at this point in time that one would think I would have noticed that the sign had tried to sever my toe off, but I did not. It took me an additional twenty minutes to figure out that my toe had actually been damaged in two places.
"Fuck," I repeated, but with much less enthusiasm. While the wound on the top of my toe was nothing to worry about, the slice in between my toes proved more worrisome.
It looked like the kind of cut that needed stitches. I'd had such a cut once before, the result of a failed attempt to cut a watermelon using a bread knife, but had managed to escape getting stitches when the admitting nurse at the ER told me it would only require one. "No. No, thank you," I had told her, and quickly convinced my father that our time would be better spent somewhere other than the ER. But this cut - this cut looked worse than the watermelon fiasco. This cut looked like my foot had started to evolve and this evolutionary stage involved the formation of a mouth.
I wiggled my baby toe and the mouth laughed at me. "Good luck with your day of shoe shopping now," it said.
That's when it came to me: super glue. Both my grandfather and uncle had told me stories in which they sang the praises of super glue and its joyous medicinal qualities. "You know it was developed during the war as a quick alternative to stitches," my grandfather had said.
So that morning I had my father run out to Canadian Tire and fetch me a tube of super glue.
Let me just tell you this, internet: super glue is super awesome.

1 comment:

Accidentally Me said...

Totally true! You can absolutely close cuts with super glue...it has saved me at least twice!

Um...about this sign, though...