Or: who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
A report from Monday 2/17, when in the morning, while getting breakfast, I must have knocked my right hand against something with a sharp edge to it and nicked it (without any pain, so I didn’t realize it had happened) — because, when I looked down at the first knuckle, a bright bead of blood had welled up and was about to run down my hand. I grabbed some kleenex, wrapped it around the wound, and went to the bathroom to get a bandaid to cover the wound until the blood had clotted. (Clotting takes a while because I take a blood thinner — for atrial fibrillation, which seems to have vanished — which also means I have tons of bruises where I knock up against things with one bodypart or another. Medical treatments, side effects, it’s a balancing act.)
The day ticked on. Late in the afternoon, checking my Facebook page before getting up to assemble some dinner, I looked down, and my right hand was entirely covered with blood, which was streaming onto the pad under my keyboard. Onto my mousepad. And onto the tabletop. Blood everywhere, Jesus fuck. I must have knocked the scab loose against something, again without any warning pain, it was so minor. (No, I had not lost sensation in my fingers, that would have been truly scary.)
Mopped up blood on my hand with a lot of kleenexes, used a bunch more to wrap tightly around the wound. Then a half hour of using my functioning left hand, a pile of paper towels, and a bowl of ice water to get bloodstains out of stuff.
I did this. I did a really fine job, too. I did not come unstrung, I did not break down in tears of despair. I was methodical and workmanlike. I was the resourceful Dutch boy with his finger in the dike (a major instructional figure of my childhood).
With great care, I used some ice water to clean my hand bit by bit. Eventually to reveal the nick. Which was insignificant, barely noticeable. Nugatory (what a fine word). I wanted to take a picture of my right hand, but that would have entailed using my right hand, so I put a big bandaid over the nick for the night (and then had to order a fresh box of bandaids in the morning, I might as well have been eating the damn things) and waited until my caregiver J came and could use my iPad to photograph the disaster site for me.
Here is J’s picture, somewhat blown up for maximum effect (as extras, you get my swollen middle finger, my inert little finger, and the muscle wasting between my thumb and index finger — I have become adept at positioning my hand in public so as to draw observers’ attention away from these defects, so that most people don’t notice them):
My name is Vulnerias, Wound of Wounds: Look on my devastation, ye Mighty, and despair!
… and they all giggled. Of course they did. Because what they saw was, as the Ro.co commercial puts it, a tiny little prick. A nugatory knuckle nick.
Disclaimer. I reject as ungracious cavils all accusations that I engineer these bodily disasters to create antic tales of my daily life. But I will cop to a certain amount of story-burnishing, a craft I learned as a young man from my first father-in-law, the literally fabulous Keene Daingerfield.
Admission. And, yes, I am whistling past the graveyard. Extravagantly enough to keep the specters at bay.