I had the water boiling for the pasta, the butter melting for the onions and mushrooms to saute (sometimes you just GOTTA use butter instead of margarine), and I had sliced up the onions in nice small wedges like the recipe called for. Kurt was slicing the mushrooms with our mushroom slicer when one of the blades popped off. It's not a cheesy egg slicer with wires -- it actually has pretty sharp blades that slice the mushrooms quite well.
Kurt is a pretty handy guy and for some reason figured he could fix this $8 mushroom slicer. He went into the garage where the work bench is while I started getting the sour cream sauce together, when I heard him yell. I can't remember now what it was that he yelled, but I know he did.
Poor guy had sliced himself!! These blades in the mushroom slicer are basically long and thin razor blades, so it's not surprising that he cut himself. I asked how bad it was, and he said right off the bat that he needed stitches. So we cleaned up the kitchen a bit so the cats wouldn't get into everything, wrapped his hand in a towel, and drove down to the hospital.
It was a short cut on his left middle finger, between the top and middle knuckles, but it was deep enough that it didn't want to stop bleeding. Kurt was a little afraid that we'd get all the way down to the hospital, and they'd just put a Band-Aid on it and tell him to go back home. Fortunately in that respect, he did need stitches. Three, to be exact, and I watched the nurse put them in. It was so neat!! She used a tiny, tiny curved needle and tied off each stitch 4-5 times, and he was done in no time.
I was very proud of Kurt because I'm used to my father being extremely angry at himself and "his stupidity" when something like that happens. Kurt realized that it was sort of stupid for him to try to fix a dangerous gadget like that, but he wasn't beating himself up. He recognized that he needed stitches, and off we went.
I'm also pretty proud of myself because I stayed really calm, and didn't freak out when I realized that he was bleeding enough to leave drops of blood on the work bench. I'm also not queasy at the sight of blood either, so that helped. I kept calm while we figured out that we needed to go to the hospital, and I didn't yell at him or berate him for cutting himself. It didn't make sense to. It wasn't going to help anything if I got mad, and I didn't see why I should. I kept him laughing as we drove to the hospital because he was in some pain, and we kept laughing even in the exam room. That was mainly due to the fact that he totally messed up our home phone number on the paperwork the hospital had him fill out. So we had a good laugh, and finally everything was taken care of and we could AT LAST get some dinner. :o)
All night when I woke up I would check on him and make sure his finger wasn't hurting him, I suppose because my maternal instinct is starting to kick in. He slept just fine, and now the corpsman on the ship gave him a splint to keep his finger immobile. When he called me this morning, he told me his finger feels so much better now because he's not constantly moving his finger and accidentally banging against stuff with it.
I teased Kurt this morning and asked for a final tally of all the stitches he's had in his life. He's up to nineteen total stitches now. I'm pretty surprised it's taken over four years for him to get hurt enough to need stitches -- or maybe I'm a good influence on him.
I just hope that I'm not carrying a boy right now, or that if we do have a son, he doesn't take after Kurt. Otherwise I can see I have a lot more hospital visits in store for me! :o)