Cutting Remarks

I teased what happened yesterday on Facebook. Now to tell you the bloody details. I came home from school to have a quick turnaround until the Knick game. When I got home I realized that I forgot to freeze the bagels I had bought the day before. Needless to say, they were very hard. That led to the blood. Even after softening them up in the microwave, they were hard. I was cutting one, the knife slipped and went deep into the ball of my left index finger. There was a lot of blood. I ran to the bathroom to clean it out. I was trained well as a kid. It wouldn’t stop bleeding. I had to hold the hand high over my head to reach my bedroom where the band-aids were, without bleeding all over everything. I got back to the bathroom and discovered that it was bleeding too much for a band-aid. I had noticed that I my bacitracin was not with the band-aids. All I could find was a roll of gauze and wrapped that around my hand. I hated being late for the game but I figured I needed to stop at the urgent care, it might even need stitches. The UC is only a few blocks away but to get there I had to pass Con-Ed emergency workers. There was a problem with the power. There was no electricity there and the EC was closed. There is no other one nearby and I didn’t want to have to walk over to Montefiore hospital so I went to the Knick game to see how things would shake out.

I got there and had bled through a lot of the gauze. Alan had band-aids. If I used two, they could stay on. He also had alcohol wipes. Sure, that burned but I wanted it disinfected. Alan said that Madison Square Garden had first-aid so I figured I’d go during half-time. The first-aid guy on my level wasn’t at his station. I had to go down a level to the first-aid room. There was nobody there. Customer service called on the radio and I had to wait until well after the second half started for someone to arrive. He looked at it, said it was bad and would probably need stitches. He couldn’t do it but there was someone one level below that could. That was a non-public level. We passed the Knick City Dancers on the way. None of them said, “Hey you look cute, here’s my phone number.” Shocking, right? I then found out that it the person there, I was told it was a doctor but I don’t know, she might have been a nurse. She might have been a paramedic. In any event she couldn’t stitch me up and said it needed to be taken care of right away. That I shouldn’t wait until after the game. She also said I should go to an ER not an Urgent Care as all Urgent Cares don’t have someone that can stitch. Great, so now I had to find the closest ER. It was Bellevue on the East Side. I took a cab.

Then came the part I dreaded. I know about triage. A guy with a cut hand is not moved to the front of the line. I took my seat and waited. And I waited. To make it more disconcerting, the hospital is right by a homeless shelter. Most of the other people waiting were homeless. I am empathetic and seeing the people with the swollen feet bothers me. Just to be clear, the problem was not with the people, but with what they have to suffer with.

I had to wait so long that the waiting area I was in closed. They escorted me to the other end of the hospital, quite a long walk to another area. This was not a waiting area, but the actual ER but I was still waiting in a chair. I felt, and I was, very much in the way as people on beds get getting wheeled by me and I had to tuck my feet in each time. I amused myself with my phone. Good thing I had it, I had to wait hours. I understood as everyone around me had more serious problems.

I finally saw a doctor. I recognized her name. I recognized her face. It was a friend of a friend. My friend often referred to her in the early days of COVID-19. I would often respond to the posts on Facebook, so Facebook kept suggesting the person as a friend to me. She didn’t know it but she was one of my experts during the early days of the pandemic. Just to make sure I asked her if she knew my friend and she said yes. My friend is of course a musician, a huge proportion of my friends are musicians, she’s also a physician. The doctor seeing me saw that I was wearing my Folk Music Notebook hoodie and was going to ask me if I was in the folk world. I hated getting hurt and waiting for hours and missing almost the entire game, and everything else involved, but I loved that coincidence. My friend called it a New York experience. I think of it as a folk world experience. I know a lot of people that know a lot of people.

She looked me and said I needed two stiches. I figured it would be one or two though I was hoping that a butterfly bandage would do. The doctor didn’t do the stitching that was a lovely physicians assistant from Poland. How do we know? I’m me, we had a conversation, we learned about each other. Later another nurse came to discharge me. I saw she had a McGill sweatshirt on. I asked her if she were Canadian. Turns out that though she is from here her grandmother is from Canada and she has Canadian citizenship. As she lived in Montreal guess what we talked about. You should have guessed poutine. If you said Montreal bagels give yourself half-credit. We didn’t talk about them, but we should have.

I didn’t get home until 3 AM. I have to get up at 5 AM so I called in sick. Good thing as my bandages were bloody in the morning and I had to change the dressing. I’ve been home all day but was very tired and slept much of it. That’s why I’m writing so late. Wednesday is Disney+ Day, I have to watch the Mandalorian and the Bad Batch. As I only have one and a half useful hands, and I can’t let my left hand get wet I might order in or just have peanut butter for dinner. After I posted this, I’ll figure that out and start watching TV. As long as I still have both hands, I’ll let you know how things are going tomorrow.