SAGE ADVICE: A slice of life

It’s gotten to be something of a routine. I plunge some sharp object – Sunday night it was a knife – into some part of my body – Sunday night it was the webbing between my thumb and pointer finger. By now I know when it needs stitches, when it needs a band-aid and when it needs to be ignored, because you know sometimes bleeding appendages will stop bleeding if you just pay them no mind. A few weeks ago the same spot on the same hand got laid open with a hatchet. Yes, a hatchet, and yes I was being reasonably careful, but obviously not quite careful enough. It required a couple days of band-aid therapy. I knew that one was minor, after I made quite sure my thumb was still there, still working and still willing to help grab things like hatchets to fling through the air in pain-induced rages.
Sunday I knew without looking that stitches would be a requirement. When a knife slides through skin to the hilt, if pocketknives can be said to have a hilt, you can be pretty sure stitches will be required. The prospect of reconstructive nerve surgery crossed my mind.
It happened just after 6 p.m., around the time I should have been washing up for supper. Two emergency rooms, two and half hours and three measly stitches later, I was back home, washing up my right hand for supper. I was sure it would have taken more than three stitches. When it happened, what with the blood gushing out and the knife sticking in, I was sure we were talking five or six. Even at the hospital, my seasoned eye told me it would be four. But no. It was three. That’s three closer to a 1,000, which I’m shockingly close to, if you count the couple hundred I got in my mouth after a ninth grade car wreck.
Sunday just after 6 p.m. I was also pretty sure I wouldn’t need two hospitals for the required sewing up of the hand. But no. Again. After sitting, bleeding into a washcloth till the washcloth stuck to my hand, waiting in vain for a triage nurse to appear, for around a half hour, at Smyth County Community Hospital, I figured I might as well go somewhere else. I reasoned that if it took that long to find somebody to triage me, I might be there in the waiting room for the better part of a week, bleeding and sticking to washcloths and such, before someone came out with a needle and thread to sew me back together. I also figured that if somewhere else was as bad as Smyth County, I’d have my wife break out one of her quilting needles and do the job herself, after, of course, heating the needle with a cigarette lighter, because everyone knows that kills all the germs a body needs to kill.
Turns out I didn’t need the cigarette lighter, quilting needle, heavy duty denim thread fix. Wythe County Community Hospital took me in like they’d just been waiting to see me. Before I’d even filled out paperwork – they had my wife do all that nonsense – they had me back in the back, numbed, tetanus shotted and sewn together. I was out of the ER completely, driving home to wash my right hand and eat some supper before I’d even told anyone my name at Smyth County. Wythe County had a couple of doctors, a nurse practitioner and a nurse in the space where Smyth County had an empty chair where a triage nurse ought to have been. Now I’m not saying mine was a life or death situation or even an emergency, really. Obviously it wasn’t. Slouching toward 1,000 stitches is more business as usual than anything else, but I worry about those who might come in with real emergencies, life or death ones, and stare into that triage station void. They might not have time to drive to Wytheville.