So That's The Last Time I'll Complain About THAT

Hey y'all -

We were having a slow afternoon around here. It's a federal holiday, so we were all still hanging out in our pajamas at lunchtime. I was thinking to myself, "I should probably crank out a blog post, but nothing interesting ever happens around here." Hagen was taking a nap, Laney was enjoying some ravioli, I was talking to Peg Peg on the webcam and Dad was out in the wood shop.  Hardly blog-worthy material.

Then, Thor came in the house, clutching his hand to his body, dripping blood on the floor. "I cut my hand with the saw," he said. "We need to go to the hospital." The blood didn't upset me half as much as Thor using the word, "hospital." After all, this is a man who - I don't want to throw around words like "routinely" - has been known to shoot himself in the hand with a nail gun and laugh it off. He thinks the appropriate emergency response to most injuries is, "Rub dirt on it." When he and Uncle Nate would get injured in their Judo practice, their motto was, "Pain is just weakness leaving the body." I can't even type that without rolling my eyes. Point is: This is not a man whose first impulse is to turn to modern medicine.

So I tossed him a washcloth and he wrapped his finger in it to staunch the bleeding while I threw the kids in the car and made one mad dash back into the house to grab a change of clothes, because (blame my Southern upbringing) if a doctor is going to look me in the face and tell me my husband is losing a finger, I want to be wearing a bra.

They've been doing construction on the 7 miles of dirt road that connect our house to the interstate. As we approached the first checkpoint with a little lady holding a stop sign in the middle of the road, I rolled down my window, stuck my head out and screamed, "HOSPITAL! EMERGENCY!" and more or less kept driving. At the second stop, the person holding the stop sign was on Thor's side, so I rolled his window down. He held up his bloody washcloth and started in on Moby Dick version of our story: "Hey, um, I cut my hand, and we're on our way to -" By then, both the stop sign lady and I were both so irritated by the pace of his story that she flipped her sign over to SLOW, and I kept driving.

In between bouts of worrying about the future of my husband's middle finger, I started contemplating a brilliant future as a getaway driver.

Then, Laney crying in the back seat: "If Dad's hand is okay, can I go to the bookstore?"

I dropped Thor off at the Urgent Care clinic at the hospital and dropped the kids off at Grandma Sue's. I made it back to the hospital in time to watch the seasoned doctor reattach the tip of his finger. She actually said, "Huh. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. Good thing I like puzzles!" I'm going to file that right next to Grandma Sue sitting at my dinner table last week, saying, "That bear we cooked that one time wasn't greasy at all," under Crazy S#!t That Could Only Be Said By A Montanan.

In the end, they cobbled his finger back together with stitches, spray foam and bandaging. The doctor's best guess is the stitches will come off in two weeks, and the nail will grow back in six months.

Laney got to go to the bookstore.

More interested in why the Jets can't pick a quarterback than the condition of his finger.

And I will never ever again complain about a boring afternoon.

Love,
Mom

P.S. I did a Google search for the hospital where Thor was stitched up, because I was going to use a picture of it as the image for this blog post. And you know what the top search result was? An image of a woman who had been driving down a mountain road when a spruce tree came through her windshield and impaled her neck.  Killer trees. You can't make this stuff up. And in Montana, you don't have to.

P.P.S. Thanks to my in-laws on facebook for letting me know this is just the latest in a long line of Burbach finger manglings: