Kasia October 19th, 2007
Tuesday was not a very good day to be the Clam.
Having been very, very tired for the past few weeks, I was prone to oversleeping a bit. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I was prone to staying in bed absolutely as late as I could without being indecently late for work. …yeah, that’s more like it.
So Tuesday morning was no exception, though I knew I had to get up earlier than usual to prep the crock pot. I was making a yummy-looking bean soup with kale and onion and carrot and garlic and red pepper flakes, and I had already soaked the beans. I just needed to chop and sauté the veggies and load up the crock.
Well, as one might expect, I was in a bit of a hurry (though at that point I was not late!). And as I was chopping the onion (crowded onto the cutting board with the kale), either the knife slipped or my hand did, and whoops! First blood with the new, very sharp chef’s knife.
Now, I’d always thought I had a reasonably level head about injuries. I once accidentally stapled my finger and managed to remove the (quite painful) offending staple without more than a very controlled “Ouch!” passing my lips through the whole experience. And when I was starting my freshman year in high school, one of my roommates at Band Camp (yes, I could have started the sentence with “This one time, at Band Camp…” – what’s your point?) cracked her head open because she was bouncing around like a maniac. She immediately started crying, “Oh my God, [Clam], my head’s bleeding! Oh my God, [Clam], my head’s bleeding!” I, not being overly affected by blood at that point in my young life, tried to take a look at her head, but she was freaking out too much, and in fairness, there was a lot of blood. So I did what any self-respecting fourteen-year-old would do: I ran down the hall to get one of the chaperones, and let them deal with it. And when I was asked to, I gladly tried to wash the blood out of her shirt while she was off getting stitches.
But when it’s your own blood, it’s harder to stay levelheaded. I had the presence of mind to get my thumb under some cold running water (though I couldn’t remember for the life of me why that was going to help – it just seemed like a good thing to do) and try to apply some pressure. But it just kept bleeding…and kept bleeding…and kept bleeding. Being the freak that I am about dead skin, I clipped off the chunk that was hanging off the cut to try to get a better look at the cut itself – didn’t help much, except that I could see that the cut seemed to be wide rather than deep.
All I had in the house were some el cheapo band-aid knock-offs. Look: I get lots of little nicks and scrapes, and very few serious cuts. If you had that trend, you’d buy for quantity rather than quality too.
After about 15 minutes of bleeding into the sink (it was hard to say how much blood I was losing because I was still running it under cold water) and into a kitchen towel (which will never be the same), not to mention shoving my cat out of the way because whenever the bathroom tap is running he thinks he simply MUST have a drink from it, I decided it was time to take a different tack. So I improvised a pressure dressing with about half a dozen cheapo band-aids (it is HARD to do that on your own thumb, to say nothing of actually trying to unwrap the stupid things when one of your thumbs is out of commission) and drove myself to…work.
Yes, I went to work. What’s your point?
When I got to work (about a 30-45 minute drive in rush hour, depending on the route and traffic) I noticed that the outer band-aids were starting to show spots of blood, so I stopped at CVS and bought gauze, tape, and Bacitracin. I then marched into the office, apologized to my boss for being so late (he said he hadn’t even noticed), and asked him to help me put on a better pressure dressing. He’s an engineer by training. There was some pressure there, let me tell you!
I waffled most of the day about whether to go to Urgent Care and see if I needed stitches. On the one hand, it seemed like a sensible thing to do. On the other hand, the cut was right behind my thumbnail, didn’t seem like an opportune place to stitch, and for that matter didn’t look like it would be easy to stitch. Plus they’d charge me a big fat co-pay, and who wants that? And I hate feeling like a hypochondriac.
Ultimately I decided to go in, because…well, you know that thing I mentioned that I have about dead skin (not being able to stand leaving it on)? I also have trouble with caked, dried-blood band-aids sticking to wounds. Yeah. Ow. So of course it started bleeding again…
So I go very casually into the director’s office – it’s really just the three of us in our office, plus the people we’re housed with – with a couple of work-related points. “Oh, did you get the thus-and-such? OK, good…I did the thing for So-and-So…ok…oh, and by the way, I had a little accident this morning…” and he sent me packing off to Urgent Care. It was kind of funny: he said “Are you feeling lightheaded at all?” and I thought for a second and said “No, not now – I was a little earlier, though,” and he must’ve thought I thought he was going to let me off the hook, because he said “Well, still go to Urgent Care! I’m asking because you’re driving yourself – I don’t want you to end up in a shrub somewhere!”
I live in St. Clair Shores. My doctor is in Livonia. He’s affiliated with Botsford. I’d been meaning to switch doctors for a while – he dates back to when I lived in northwest Detroit – but he’s competent, and his office is flexible, and I’m basically healthy, so it was never a priority. Now it is. Because when I drove myself from midtown Detroit to Botsford to go to the Urgent Care center my doctor told me to go to, only to be charged the $75 ER co-pay instead of the $35 Urgent Care co-pay because their Urgent Care center is a subset of their ER…that was adding insult to injury.
In fairness, Botsford’s care was excellent. I was in and out in half an hour, and that was even though they were so busy in ER that they’d literally pulled all of the beds out of Urgent Care and stuck them out in the halls in ER. The doctors were pleasant and competent. The nurses were fine, even the triage nurse who gave me the distinct impression that I was wasting her time (after all, compared to everyone else she was probably seeing that day, my situation did seem pretty minor). I was a little miffed that they made me get a tetanus shot; for one thing, I seriously doubt that my new, used-less-than-a-dozen-times kitchen knife has tetanus on it, and for another thing, I had a tetanus shot seven years ago and they told me I should have one every ten years. But the doctor told me that it’s every ten years if you have no incidents; if you come in with an accident, you should have one after five years. Sounds like a racket to me. Anyway.
Seventy-five dollars to tell me that you can’t stitch my wound (which I figured anyway), to pour some water on it (which I had already done myself), to put on a new dressing (and calling that thing a pressure dressing was just a joke), and give me a tetanus shot that I shouldn’t even need yet…because your “Express Care” center is housed in ER? Even though I kept asking if I was in Urgent Care?
I confess I did let one not-very-nice comment pass to the biller who took my check: I said it was another incentive to find a doctor closer to home. Which is true, but I didn’t need to say it.
So. Anyone know a good pro-life doctor on the East Side who takes Blue Care Network?
Oh, I almost forgot: in addition to skinning the side of the tip of my thumb, I also apparently managed to cut off part of the nail. Mmm. I’m glad I threw away the veggies I’d been cutting. We don’t need Clam strips in the soup.
Anyone want a Clam-tastic manicure? 
