Guess What I Did Last Night?

Oh, OK, I'll just tell you.  You'd never guess.

I went to the emergency room.  Well, all most.  My local hospital has an urgent care center that is attached to the ER and when I went in they asked me if I wanted to be seen in the ER or in the urgent care and I ended up choosing urgent care.  But that was awfully close to going to the ER.

See, yesterday afternoon I accidentally sliced open my thumb on the blade of my food processor when I was putting it away.  To me, it looked borderline - like maybe it needed stitches, maybe not.  Like it could go either way.  I put a bandage on it and didn't worry.  That was about 4:00 pm.

About 8:00 pm, I removed the bandage.  As soon as I did, the cut started bleeding again.  It was still gaping open.  I figured that meant it needed stitches after all.

And stitches meant going to the ER.

I thought about it for a little bit.  I could think of many, many reasons not to go.  All the same reasons I didn't go when I accidentally cut my finger while chopping onions last summer.  But I could think of many reasons to go, as well.  Beyond the obvious medical reasons, I thought that if I was able to go and if I had a positive experience, that would be a really good thing for me.  And I'd been to my local hospital for lab work and I felt good about those experiences.  Staff always seemed nice and respectful and stuff.  So I decided not to think too much about all the reasons not to go and all the ways it could go wrong, but just to go.  And I went.

And it turned OK.  More than OK, really.  It was, in fact, a good experience.

They asked if I wanted to be seen in the ER or the urgent care and I said urgent care would be fine as long as they could do stitches there.  Turned out the nurse practitioner didn't think I needed stitches, though, she thought steri-strips would be sufficient.  Which means I didn't really need to go in after all.  But since I was there, the NP wanted to clean and dress my thumb.  Why is it that when you have a little wound on one digit, you end up with a bandage that looks like your hand was almost amputated?

The NP was really nice.  She asked me questions about service dogs while she took care of my thumb.  Good questions, like if programs that train service dogs trained recipients with the dogs before placing the dogs.  Which they do.  She didn't ask me anything about the scars on my arms.  She was respectful and friendly and treated me like I was an intelligent adult, completely unlike the doctor in the ER two years ago.  The RN was friendly and polite, too.

Isaac slept through most of the visit.  He said it was past his bedtime.  He drooled a little puddle on the floor.