As I have mentioned before, I am the oldest of seven, mostly feral children, all about a year and a half apart. I am 12 years older than my youngest sibling which pretty much made me the boss by default. With a family that big, there were bound to be injuries.We fought.... a lot. Everyday our yard looked like a scene from Brave Heart. I had practically become a combat medic by age 11. Besides our constant battling, at least two of my siblings were terribly clumsy and one sibling in particular had the worst case of ADHD in medical history. Imagine a clumsy Flash Gordan, that would be my oldest sister.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles + Koolaid+ 2 boys= roundhouse kick to the nose^blood
Treefort + 5 roudy siblings and 2 neighbor boys + lack of parental supervision= broken arm.
Fighting sisters= smashed fingers in the door.
7 kids+Koolaid and PB&J sandwhiches= mini armageddon at the Korvinos house.
I now understand why my mother was such a Nazi about keeping stuff out of the house that had sugar in it. We were where the wild things were.
There was so much blood being spilled at my house, that I have become a blood spatter expert.
Blood smear on the wall- Oh that means Jaime and Jeremy were watching the Ninja Turtles again. (Thanks to my brothers, we couldn't watch "Karate Kid", or the Turtles because they suddenly became karate masters of the dojo)
When one of my siblings got injured, my Mom had one of two emotions and you never knew which one you were going to get. She'd laugh at you so you didn't cry, get up and walk it off OR she'd get angry-scared and fly into super- panic ER Doctor mode. When she was frenzied Dr. Mom, she would instantly appear with a first aid kit and you'd spend the next 45 minutes in a cloud of profanity, antiseptic and bandages. You may have only had an infected flea bite on your shoulder, but my Mom's fussing coupled with her epic bandages were so intense you couldn't move your toes when she was done with you. There were a lot of times when injuries were laughed at to toughen us up. Like the time I got a splinter in my butt from the sea saw at school and my Mom tried to get it out in front of the Avon lady laughing the whole time.
"Pfft...you don't need to go to the doctor, it's only a flesh wound. Stop bleeding on my carpet"
I'm so tough now.
We didn't always like to call Mom for help. We only called Dr. Mom when we couldn't stop the bleeding with copious amounts of toilet paper and electrical tape. Gnerally we knew what to do when there was blood. See above chart. But when our parents got hurt....that was just weird and terrifying. There was nothing we could do.
When I was growing up, my parents fought a lot. They fought about money, inlaws, outlaws, kids, housing on a daily basis. They always managed to make up, at least until they didn't.
One day in particular my Mom and Dad got into a big fight and my Mom loaded us all up and we went to the mall. To this day, I do not know what their fight was about, or why we went to the mall when we had literally no money to spend and I do not think I want to know. When we came home my Dad was ghost white and had his hand wrapped in a t-shirt. It didn't take a psychic to figure out something bad had happened. My Mom flew out of the car- I don't even think it was in park yet, and ran over to him.
"What's wrong! What happened?" My Mom demanded.
"Nothing- just get me to the hospital." Said my Dad wrapping the shirt around his hand even tighter- as if he was trying to protect it from her prying fingers.
"What did you do?! What happened?" My Mom pleaded.
"Nothing, just get me to the hospital." My Dad had gone from white to green and his eyes were sad when he looked down at his tightly wrapped hand.
Here's where frenzied ER Doctor Mom came out.
"Goddamn it! I want to know what happened and I want to know right the fuck now." She pried his hand away from his chest where he'd been clutching it.
I realized all of us kids were standing around him...watching silently; some of us crying. I was angry and scared and I didn't know why. The last time I saw my Dad act this way, his best friend had died in a terrible accident.
"You don't want to see Diana." He said softly, but my Mom wasn't having it.
"Jesus Christ!" My mother exclaimed when she finally got the shirt unraveled and saw the damage. Without missing a beat, she loaded my Dad and 5 of my sibling into the car, leaving my brother Jeremy and I alone to look for his finger.
It wasn't until my Mom said, "Find your Dad's finger," that I realized what had happened. I felt so horrible for him, imagining what I would feel like if I had cut off my finger.
It turned out that my Dad, having felt bad about their fight, decided to make my Mom some flower boxes. (Totally something my viking would do). He slipped somehow while using the table saw, cut the tip of his pinky finger off and sent it flying across the garage and now my brother and I were tasked with locating it.
I left my brother in the garage to follow the blood trail and I ran into the house and called the hospital like my Mom told me to do. I can only imagine what the hospital staff member who answered the phone was thinking.
"Hello, Korvinos Family Hospital. Which child is this?"
I had no sooner hung up the phone when my brother came in from the garage.
"I found the finger."
"Good, go get it." I said getting a glass full of ice.
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't want to."
"Do it anyway. It's your Dad's finger!" He looked pale and scared.
"Fine you big baby." I said and stomped out to the garage. It wasn't that he was a baby- he just had more empathy than I did at that age. I think it must have physically hurt him to look at his Dad's separated finger.
"It's there." said my brother Jeremy, pointing between two boxes on the floor of the garage.
I picked up the finger and looked at it for a brief moment, even giving it a little squeeze to show my brother I wasn't scared at all. I tried to keep my composure, even pretending that holding the finger was somehow cool, but I was horrified inside. It looked just like my Dad's finger, only not attatched to his hand anymore. The finger just ended ubruptly and when I looked at the part where the knuckle would be, I could only see the exposed red, spongy flesh; no bones or blood at all. It was suprisingly clean.
By my brothers reaction, I expected the finger to be mangled...maybe even inching across the garage floor in search of it's missing hand. I thought to myself, "This actually is kind of cool. This is my Dad's finger."
Then the mini combat medic in me came out. I rushed to the kitchen and I dropped my Dad's finger into that cup full of ice. All of the things I had ever read in books or seen in movies about what to do when someones cuts something off of their body began flooding my mind. I began to second guess myself. "Wait...wasn't that supposed to be ice water?" Consequently, I filled the cup with ice water and then my brother and I went running across the street to our old neighbors house with the finger floating in a cup.
Me to the neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, "Our Dad cut his finger off and we need a ride to the hospital so they can sew it back on." I held the cup up high so old Mr. Johnson could see it. I don't think he heard me the first time because he said, "By god, is that a finger in ice water?"
Mr. and Mrs. Johnson only had room for one kid, so I sent my brother with the finger to the hospital and I stayed home and cleaned, full of nervous energy. I waited for hours for my Dad to get home. I was so sure he'd be so proud of me for picking up his finger and being smart enough to put it in ice water, but when he came home, he was still a pinky finger short.
My Dad says that the bone was cut too jaggedly for them to sew it back on, but I heard that because the finger was stuck in ice water- that the tissue bloated and blood vessels shrank making it too hard to reattach it. I guess I'll never know the truth.
My Dad never acted like losing his finger was a big deal. He never blamed me for putting it in ice water either. In fact, he has always made a joke out of it whenever people asked about it. His favorite trick is to put the stub up to his nostril so it looks like his entire finger is up inside his nose.
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| Four things my Dad told people about his missing finger. |
Now that I am a Mom, I still use toilet paper and electrical tape for injuries. My childhood prepared me for life as the mother of vikings, though I won't let them anywhere near a table saw. As for my brother, he now works with blood for a living as a kick ass tattoo artist. See below :)
https://www.facebook.com/jeremy.elledge.7
Oh and in case your wondering- when a finger is severed off- you do not put it in ice. Instead you clean it, wrap it in gauz, place it in a plastic bag and THEN place it in ice water. See Below:
What to do if you cut something off!
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