president’s day bloodletting

So like many Americans, I can’t enjoy any celebration of the birth of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln without a glance or two at my left index finger and the long, straight scar there …

[*insert wavy vision, Wayne’s World-like flashback intro*]

It’s President’s Day sometime in the late 1970s—I want to say ’77 or ’78, which would make me a young tween more interested in Star Wars and KISS than helping my father around the house.

My poor dad—he’s a handy guy who undertakes numerous home improvement projects, and most of the time, all he wants is a competent assistant who can hold the end of the board steady while he saws the other end of it. Instead, what he has is me.

Although I am reluctant, I always try to do my best, but at this point in my life, I would not categorize myself as “handy,” or even all that useful. Often at a critical point during a project, he’ll be at the top of a ladder trying to hold something together and be like, “Hey, go run down to the workroom and get me a 3/4-inch socket wrench.” I’ll run down there, get to the workbench and just … stare. He has so many tools and and I have so little clue. I truly want to find the right one, but am seemingly incapable of it. After a time, he’ll eventually come in, grab it off the dead center of the rack and say something like, “If it had teeth, it would’ve bitten you!” He’s never mean about it and hides his frustration well, but I always feel bad that I just don’t have the aptitude he’s looking for.

An aside: As a homeowner now, I’ve gotten better in terms of being able to fix or install things—I’ve actually become quite a good painter. The irony is that my youngest son enjoys working with tools and has an engineer’s mentality. When I go to do some project, he’s often interested in helping out, and really understands how to use tools. I guess it skips a generation.

Anyway, back to President’s Day, nineteenseventy-something.

My father is working on our bathroom, making some cosmetic upgrades—new window treatments, towel rack, that sort of thing. One of the items on the agenda is replacing the worn-out grippy stickers off the floor of the bathtub. Against his better judgment, he decides to let me be in charge of scraping off the old stickers.

He hands me the scraper knife—

—and warns me to be careful as it’s very sharp.

I don’t know if I use the exact words, “Don’t worry, what could possibly go wrong?” but my attitude is, “I got this, no problem!”

I climb into the tub, get on my hands and knees and start scraping. My father goes to work on the window and all is well … for a while. Of course, me being me, I can’t work without a little levity.

“Ooops, I cut myself,” I declare, somewhat devilishly.

“What?!” he says, abandoning the window to come over to check on me. “Really?!”

“No,” I laugh and show him that I’m fine. Come on, man! I’m like 13. I think I can handle scraping a few stickers!

He shakes his head, and goes back to the window. I go back to scraping. A few minutes later, I joke again that I cut myself.

This time, he doesn’t leave what he’s doing, but sincerely asks if I’m okay. I laugh, stand up and show him that I’m fine. He shakes his head again, and goes back to work.

So I’m in the tub, scraper in my right hand, my left hand out in front to steady myself. I’m scraping, scraping, scraping … but this one sticker is giving me a tough time. Wanting to get it, I wind up and give it extra effort—

—OOOOPS!!!—

—and watch in shock as the scraper instead slides forward over the sticker and directly into my left hand!

I instantly pull it back, and for a split second, I think that somehow I’m going to be okay, despite the fact that suddenly my finger is wide open and I can see into it …

… and then the bloods starts. Gushing.

“Oh no …” I say, getting to my feet and out of the tub. “I really did it this time.” I’m trying to hold the skin on my finger together as blood is suddenly everywhere.

“What?” my dad harrumphs, not bothering to look away from the window. “Did you ‘cut’ yourself again?”

I stand next to him and hold my left hand up, the blood running down my elbow. “Uh yeah, except I REALLY did it this time!”

He turns and looks at me. “OH [*EXPLETIVE*]!”

He grabs my hand and drags me to the sink. He turns on the water and he’s running my hand under it. As fast as the water can wash away the blood, it flows back up out of my finger. My dad is trying to hold me steady as I try to squirm away from my own damaged hand.

“Is that the bone?” I ask, hysteria creeping into my voice.

“Uhh … I think you’re going to need stitches,” he says.

For some reason, this thought terrifies me, which is funny—here I am losing copious amounts of blood, and the idea that they might have to use a surgical needle to close a gaping wound, is a problem. “Maybe they can fix it another way?” I plead, as I’ve never had stitches and have no real concept of what they are.

I don’t remember what he says next, but he turns off the water, grabs something to wrap my hand and we head out to the car. He tells me to hold my hand tight, and in a blur, we drive to Milford Hospital. I don’t know if it’s a slow day or that the blood is flowing up through whatever we wrapped my hand with, but my father hands me off to the nurses and I get to go directly into the emergency room, no waiting.

Apparently the upside of slicing your finger open with an incredibly sharp razor is that, although long and bloody, the wound is very neat. After some debate and my whimpering pleas, the ER doctor reluctantly closes up my finger up with butterfly stitches, although he tells me that it would be better to use regular stitches. Still, he acquiesces to my wishes, uses a lot of them and then cautions me to be extra careful. Before I know it, I’m cleaned up and looking for my dad, except he’s not in the waiting room.

The nurses lead me to him, and he’s in a quiet room in the back. He asks if I’m okay—I say I am, and we go home.

It’s funny—I didn’t think anything of him being in the back of the ER at the time, but years later he told me what happened. Apparently, after I was brought into the treatment area, the shock of all the blood and what happened suddenly hit him, and he got a little woozy. One of the nurses had noticed that he suddenly didn’t look so good, and had asked him if he needed to lay down for a moment, which he agreed that he needed to.

Bottom line was that the drama over—I sliced my finger open, and now all I have is this lousy scar. Not as cool as buying a washing machine for half price at a President’s Day sale, but at least it’s something.