Today I had an unfortunate episode of leg vs. concertina wire. Everyone knows I’m pretty accident prone. I crash into things, trip, fall down, and get bruises that I have no idea where they came from. When I was pregnant, I would forget I had a belly and crash it into door jams as I turned to walk out. My kids might be a little messed up because of that, I think. If it is possible to get hurt doing something, I’ll figure out a way. But usually nothing serious- just cuts and bruises. I get it from my dad. He's always been the same way, only worse, my whole life. He could not make it through a home improvement project without drawing blood. Pretty sure that’s still the case. But I did get half of my genes from my mom, so when I concentrate, I can be OK. I just forget to be careful a lot.
I cut myself with a knife early on in this deployment- it was clipped to my pocket and popped open (it’s a switch blade) without me knowing. I reached down and bam! It bit me. A couple of weeks ago, I cut myself with a serrated bread knife while opening a bag of bread mix. As I was cutting I was thinking I was not using the best technique (as in I was holding the bag with my left hand and cutting towards my palm with the giant knife in my right hand) and there might be a bit of risk and then mid-thought- bam! I got cut again. The serration marks were actually pretty cool. The scab just fell off a few days ago.
Then this morning, I was riding my bike for the last time on this deployment and I saw an old beat up airplane that looked like it had crashed and I wanted a picture of it. So, on my next loop around, I stopped and got my camera. As I neared the place I thought the plane would be, I was looking left and BAM! I felt something sharp hit my leg on the front just above the ankle. I knew instantaneously what it was because the concertina wire is all over the place next to the road and I had ridden next to it countless times. Then I saw the plane and pulled over. As I was laughing at my stupidity and wondering how bad it was and looking down to check out the damage, it was actually sort of bad- about an inch long, quarter of an inch deep and about half an inch wide. By now it was hurting and as I was laughing I was also saying some cuss words my kids probably think I don’t know and it looked big, but wasn’t bleeding. So I took my pictures and rode on. I took a few more pictures as it started to bleed some. Then I went back on the next circle around and got a picture of the wire that got me. I tried to find some flesh on it, because that would be the best, but there wasn’t any. Then I turned around and went back. I was going to do another loop, but I had a meeting at 0930 and this was 0800 and I figured it would take an hour in the ER for stitches. it did, but I was able to get a quick shower (with my leg propped up on the wall to keep my new stitches dry!) and make it to the 2 1/2 hour meeting on time.
I got to the ER, took a good picture of my wound, and then let the tech numb me up and wash it out. Then the doc put a couple of deep sutures in and the tech put the superficial ones in. He wasn’t as good at it as I would expect him to be if the doc left him alone with me. With his permission, I gave him a lot of pointers (as well as the other 2 techs who were watching him), then we practiced some more after he was finished my leg. He learned pretty quickly and he’ll do a lot better next time.
All in all, it’s a good story and hopefully the scar won’t be too bad. But it hurts a lot right now. The whole front of my leg down to my ankle is killing me. But even so….I still went and chased by the dogs…more on that in the next story!
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