I Cut Myself Today

I cut myself today.

I was chopping up some carrots, and the French kitchen knife slipped and grazed the side my right thumb. (I'm left-handed, which is why it was not the left thumb that was damaged.) The knife didn't cut very far, though. It took almost a minute to start bleeding, and the wound was dressed without a lot of fuss, once I got the bandage unwrapped with only one hand.

I should add at this point that I have a reputation for hurting myself in several small ways (and a few large ones). I have cut myself so often that the instructions on a Johnson & Johnson Band-aid -- "Tear off end, pull string down"--are now imprinted on my memory like a mantra. My hands bear numerous scars whose provenance I can no longer recall. So this sort of experience was nothing new to me. Indeed, the most remarkable thing is that this one showed every sign of healing up with no permanent damage at all.

So if I had been anybody else, this little incident would have been shrugged off. But I'm different. I was raised on the stories I read in the Reader's Digest and the Ladies Home Journal and the Redbook magazines that my mother subscribed to.

(Full disclosure here: I talked my mother into subscribing to them. The subscriptions were part of my high school's fundraising drives for the stadium lights that would illuminate our team's night-time games, many of which we actually won. The school administration also probably hoped that the increased illumination would cut down on the hanky-panky that pubescent students performed under the bleachers. They were mistaken; if anything, it made the darkness down there even darker and more inviting by comparison. When not studying, performing on the field, cheering from the bleachers, and fornicating under the stands, we students were expected to go door to door, selling subscriptions to neighbors, but appealing to Mom's maternal instincts was usually good for at least six magazines even before I left the house. The trick was to get to her before my brother -- who went to the same high school -- did.)

These stories in these magazines usually started with something like "As the knife/nail/glass went into my thumb/forefinger/toe, I had no inkling that my life would change forever." They would go on to detail the diseases the narrator had caught and the nerve damage inflicted, with the inevitable descent into sepsis, amputation, near death, and possibly an iron lung or something of the sort. This is not the sort of narrative that you feed to an impressionable high school freshman who had already been exposed to an Irish Catholic mother. Irish Catholics are convinced that disaster is already around the corner, waiting to pounce. If it's sunny today, it will be sure to rain tomorrow. (In Ireland, it always rains tomorrow.) If things seem to be going smoothly, it's only because the Fates have somehow overlooked you, having been momentarily distracted by their glee in visiting misfortune on somebody else. Sooner or later, they're sure to remember their appointment with you.

I dosed the cut with an antibiotic cream, but I'm not counting on that very much. That's what everybody in those stories did. It never helped. Sure, everything feels fine for a day or two, but disaster is sure to strike. That usually happens by the seventh paragraph, after they've described in detail their happy family in a wonderful neighborhood where all the dads are employed in meaningful jobs and all the moms are home cooking up all the recipes that are found elsewhere in the magazine (most of them apparently having something to do with the artful application of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup). This happy interlude sets up the part where, when the wound doesn't seem to be healing on schedule, the family decides to take the victim to the doctor. The doctor expresses concern. He (and in 1962, it's always a he) says comfortingly, "I'm sure that it's nothing serious, but I'm going to order a few tests anyway. Now just keep that wound clean and dry and everything will be fine."

Little does he know. A week later, the victim is back in the doctor's office, where he unwraps the wound. he examines it. He scowls. More tests are given. There are injections. The patient is comforted by the fact that the doctor looks like Doctor Kildare or Ben Casey or Marcus Welby, and that no doctor who looks like that can possibly find himself out of his depth. Modern viewers are not so easily reassured. They were raised on House, and know that even the most brilliant diagnostician will make three or four wrong diagnoses as the patient hovers between life and death. But these were simpler times.

Anyway, The story inevitably concludes with a hospitalization, usually accompanied by the aforesaid amputation or a collapse of the immune system or both. Weeks pass as a grueling re-adjustment is made to the patient's life-style. Because the magazine is a family publication, the patient can be counted on to make some sort of recovery, or at least an adaptation to new circumstances and a renewed appreciation of the Value of Life. He or she credits doctors, nurses, family members and friends for their unfailing support and skill. The reader then turns the page with newfound respect for the medical profession, and finds an advertisement about the many ways that Heinz ketchup can enliven your next meat loaf.

I'd better go change that bandage now. Not that that will help.