Colleen Vs. the Tuna Can

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT SCROLL DOWN SLOWLY IF YOU DO NOT LIKE THE SIGHT (OR PICTURES) OF BLOOD, OPEN WOUNDS, OR STITCHES! Skip way ahead.

Okay, so I got an early start in 2009 with all the action. Sunday, January 4 started off as a normal day. Woke a sick Jay up at 7:30am after having gone to bed at 2:30am (Chargers game at a sports bar for Bobby’s birthday then the last 2 episodes of Season 1 of Chuck did us in). Realized at like 9:30am that we didn’t have to get up at 7:30am because I miscalculated what time we had to leave for the airport. Oops. We could have had a full extra hour to sleep. We were dog sitting for the weekend at my aunt’s house, so we headed to my parents house for the worst bagels I’ve ever eaten, both in and out of NY combined.

Side note: On the drive over there, I learned that I bought the wrong version of The Sims for my Macbook. I wanted the one that went with the Livin’ Large expansion pack – which I had just bought as well – but I bought The Sims 2. I don’t know, I thought that The Sims 2 was the one that went with everything. I’m an idiot.

Anyway, after the crap bagels, I drove Jay to MacArthur Airport in Islip and sent him on his way. Went back to my aunt’s house to clean up and basically wash everything that Jay had coughed on before going back home. My aunt also go very sick on her trip, so my grandparents were stopping by her house to leave food, etc for her. They head out the door at 2:15pm. I was waiting for the sheets to come out of the dryer and then I was going to go home. My mom wanted me back home between 3-3:30pm because as Italians, we eat dinner at like 3:30pm on Sundays.

So it’s 2:15pm and Grandma & Grandpa say goodbye. I decide I don’t to wait to eat dinner because I am hungry NOW. I get one of those single servings of tuna fish cans, that you peel it back to open and put it on crackers and eat. That’ll hold me over. Yeah. I’m sitting on the couch, watching Supernatural on my laptop & Skype chatting with Jay, who is at the Baltimore Airport for his layover. Please note that Jay’s new Blackberry had some sort of software issue that day and was not working at all. I go to peel back the tuna can and instead of peeling up evenly, it rolls up together (as in instead of an even horizontal motion, it rolls up vertically) and completely into my middle finger on my right hand. I looked down and saw immediately that it was not going to be okay. I ran to the front door and was SO lucky that my grandparents hadn’t left yet. They were fixing something outside the house but had already started the car. My finger is a gushing blood like a fountain & I’ve got the plastic carton the can & crackers came in under it to catch the blood. By the time my grandpa got to the door 30 seconds later, there was A LOT of blood in there. I just called out from the door across the lawn, “Umm I cut my finger and it’s bad.”

My grandpa can’t hear me and goes, “Huh?!” So I do the only thing I could do and hold it up, blood streaming and all. We go wash it out and it’s evident that the bleeding is NOT going to stop and that it’s really freaking deep. My grandparents place calls to my parents to tell them that someone has to come over to take me to the ER for stitches. Now at this point, I had left a very sick Jay on the computer for a good 5 minutes, probably wondering what’s going on. So my grandpa types him the funniest message: “this is lou. colleen has to go to er. bye.”

Yeah, I could only imagine what I’d do if I had gotten that message and had no clue what had happened and had no phone at all. So after we get my finger wrapped up, I called thru Skype to fill him in. My mom arrived and we went to the ER.

That’s basically it. We were there for about 3 hours and some guy kept puking in the room across the hall from me so it smelled terrible. I didn’t really cry at all BUT I did lose my cool when the doctor was pulling it apart and touching it to see if I had cut a tendon or not. And I started to shake from nerves and sweat when he put the anesthesia all around it because I could feel it going through my veins and it’s just such an unnatural feeling in general. Something cold running through your veins and all. It took a good 3 or 4 minutes before it was numb. My dad had come down when he heard what was happening and he stayed in there with me because my mom’s not so good with blood at all. It felt silly having both your parents with you in the ER to get stitches in your finger at 24 years old, but neither wanted to leave and I felt loved. I ended up watching him do the stitches.

Okay, so here’s the gross part. I have pictures from my camera phone that I took while we were in the ER and then pictures of what it looks like now, 4 days later. I just took the badages off for the first time to change them right before I took them. I went big, huh? Gotta go big or go home. Thank goodness that I only cut my finger!


All stitched up:



Thanks for stopping by! Hopefully this is the only time I’ll have to post open wounds on here ever again (knock on wood).

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