My day began, as always, with a cursory check of the animals to make sure they were still alive. (Sometimes they die.) After some coffee, I came up with a plan to consolidate the frog tank and the turtle enclosure, and to make the turtle enclosure more bog-garden-esque. As per my usual method, I acted on this plan without thinking for any length of time. I find that most things would never be done if people thought about them first.

Having ascertained that the Pier One bamboo dish-drying rack would be the perfect dimensions for a tank barrier if disassembled, I promptly began to disassemble it. This proved difficult as the Pier One people did not design the bamboo dish-drying rack to be disassembled. But giving up on lost causes is not one of my traits, therefore I persevered.

Presently, the time came when bashing the metal pegs and staples from the wood had exhausted it’s usefulness, and I needed something to cut with. The material at hand being a “wood”, the optimum implement would have been a saw. But since my saw was buried inconveniently in the closet, I chose the next best thing: A serrated kitchen knife 18″ long. “Saws are serrated,” I reasoned, “and some are about 18″ long, ” I reasoned, “so who is to say this knife is not the same as a saw?”

Perhaps the outcome would have been better if I had not chosen, as my sawing table, my lap. Perhaps, but probably not. As I held the bamboo dish-drying rack (which was *almost perfect* for want of being sawn in half) to my thigh with my left hand, I sawed with great might with my right.

The trusty knife did the work of 10 men! It sheared through the bamboo like a kitchen knife slicing through a punky bamboo dish-drying rack. It was all going so well. Too well, in fact, when, with one of my strong, steady knife strokes, I sawed the back of my left hand in half.

Not the whole back of the left hand, but a good enough portion of it to make me stop sawing.

In disbelief I stared at the newly revealed chicken meat resting below the skin of that hand. The wound had sprung open to the shape of a diamond. Blood began to ooze from the gaping wound. I began to contemplate the idea that perhaps I shouldn’t have been using a kitchen knife to saw a piece of bamboo in half on my lap.

But hindsight is twenty-twenty, and as I said in the beginning, if people thought about things before doing them, nothing would ever get done.

After attempting to apply a band-aid to the wound, with unsatisfactory results, I decided to see a medical professional about closing it up. It could have stayed open for all I cared about the blood (there wasn’t much), or the pain (there wasn’t any, I having conveniently severed all the nerves in the skin), or the sight of chicken meat (it was getting near lunchtime anyway).

However, I was haunted by the memory of a TV show about a man who neglected a wound and got gangrene and had to have his toe cut off. This memory prompted me to seek help. But only for the cut.

I drove down the street to my Primary Care Physician’s practice, told the office assistant I had cut myself and needed first aid, and was immediately taken to a room by a nurse. A word of caution here for those of you planning on cutting your hand and going to the doctor’s office: They don’t like you to be talking on your cell phone to your husband when they bring you back, even if you DO need him to put money into your checking account.

The nurse asked me the obvious question in the exam room: Have you had a tetanus shot recently? I told her “Yes, I had one last year when I fell into the pit at Jiffy Lube.” After that, she didn’t seem to mind any more if I talked to my husband on the cell phone.

I ran a few errands after the doctor stitched me up. It only took three stitches. When I returned, one of the turtles had escaped to another room. That one will be named “Cruiser”.

I put Cruiser back in the tank and then stood perusing the wreckage of my hastily abandoned enclosure project. I thought, “How could something so right go so wrong?” The answer came to me like the voice of God was speaking directly to me: Power Saw.

-End

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