Keeping Score

In Stitches

I came the closest I've ever been to needing stiches tonight. I gave myself the hugest gash ever across my left index finger while trying to knock out one of the panels in my wife's new computer case*. We're talking the kind where you know you did some damage, and in the half-second it takes for you to yank your hand out and look at it, you're trying to catch the blood that's gushing out and about to run off of it onto the carpeting. I have a matching and adjacent gash on my ring finger where the nice sharp piece of metal kept right on cutting, ginsu-style.

I can honestly say that I've never seen blood flow from my body that quickly. It was like a frickin' firehose of blood. Or you know, as much blood as you could feasibly get out of a cut that went about a quarter-inch deep into my finger (not down to the bone; think more fillet-styled.). So maybe more of an action-figure scale firehose or something. Luckily, since it was more horizontal than deep and vertical, the bleeding stopped fairly fast, and I don't think I'll need stiches after all.

The funny thing is that I almost passed out while I was bleeding all over the kitchen sink. Not from the blood, nor from the idea of getting stiches. I'm deathly afraid of needles, and I figured that they'd probably numb my finger up before they put the stiches in. The combo-platter of seeing just how deep the cut went (which I can handle when it happens to somebody else) and the thought of the needle just about dropped me. ::shudders::

* The bitch of it all is that the damn PC still isn't up and running. It won't recognize the stupid IDE ports. It would be nice if the blood went to serve for something. You know, like get the Purple Heart of computer building or something. Sometimes, I hate scratch-building PCs.