Ow!

Saturday. Trying to do several things at once, in a bit of a hurry. Trying to slide the back door of the car closed while opening the front one, in order to put my hand in and push down the button to lock the back door. (No, I don't have central locking. I don't like it.) I do this often, though in future I may not, because on this occasion my timing was all to pot, and I managed to complete the sliding-the-back-door-closed bit before starting the opening-the-front-door bit, with the result that part of my right hand, viz., my right pinkie, ended up between the two doors as they collided. Fortunately neither of them was locked at the time, so I was able to slide the back one open again very smartly, but the damage was done. It was incredibly painful. I went jumping back into the house going, "ow! OW! OW! OWWWW!" followed by the cat, who was going, "miaow, miaow, miaow," in a normal, catlike manner, which led Steve to think I was doing cat impressions instead of screaming in agony. I didn't even realise I'd left a trail of blood. I thought I'd just crushed the finger, not burst it open too.

Well, once I'd finished hyperventilating and bleeding all over the kitchen I managed to clean and bandage the wound, which isn't actually quite as bad as it felt. There's quite a deep cut, but nothing's broken, and the wound's nice and clean. The finger's bruised a bit, and of course it's difficult to type with a bandage on your finger if you're the sort of typist who's been using all her fingers on the keyboard ever since that summer when she was 9, and bored, and decided to learn to touch-type on an ancient antique typewriter using her mother's old workbooks which gave her loads of practice in producing nice neat bits of typescript declaring over and over such words of wisdom as, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party".

Heigh ho. I've damaged practically all my fingers at one time or another, so it's nothing new. Let's see: when I was still at school I embedded a penknife in my left hand ring finger while trying to remove the crown cap from a glass Coke bottle; twice I've sliced a bit off the tip of a finger, sending me once to sit in a long queue in the casualty department of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and on the other occasion to the doctor's surgery; I've had an axe through my thumb, cut a piece of finger while slicing onions, burnt a finger on a hot exhaust pipe, squashed a thumb between two rocks while chucking them into a wheelbarrow, lost a couple of nails which eventually grew in again, and of course had my right index finger bitten by a jealous dog when the new dog arrived. Then there are the everyday cuts and scratches caused by sharp tools, hammers and pointy bits of cane, and the burns from touching things that have been soldered without waiting for them to cool down, or from taking bread out of the oven and brushing against a hot oven shelf. There was a nasty blister too, when the steam from the kettle attacked my thumb, and another occasion when a couple of fingers, for no apparent reason, developed a swelling which would quite likely have spread to the rest of my hand and then my arm had I not lived in an era and a place where antibiotics are available.