Bloodbath in the Kitchen II - The Return of the Bandages

What is with me and bloody fingers? Somehow it happened again – Bloodbath in the Kitchen 2, the sequel to the gory Bloodbath in the Kitchen where I slashed my hand open with a carving knife. This time, however, a glass imploded in my hand. I still don’t know how it happened - I went to pick it up and it shattered as soon as I closed my hand around it. I heard the high-pitched tinkling of glass breaking before I registered that my hand had just gone straight through it. A couple of seconds ticked by before the sharp pain was felt but my brain was working slowly and it was another second or two before I fully grasped what had happened. I brought my hand up in front of my face, saw the blood and experienced a strong feeling of déjà vous. Then I started to panic. I was all alone, The Husband was at work. What was I going to do?


I turned the tap on full blast and thrust my hand into the heavy stream of water, feeling guilty about the excessive water consumption despite my injuries – I have clearly been indoctrinated by the Australian water police. The blood would not stop, the wound looked deep and tears began to prick my eyes. My breathing became shallower, I was starting to go into shock. I needed to call The Husband but my mobile phone was across the kitchen, in sight but not within reach on the dining room table. I stretched over to the kitchen roll, grabbing it with my uninjured hand, and tightly wrapped my throbbing thumb, still managing to spurt blood across the worktop and floor. Thumb inexpertly bandaged, I rushed over to the phone and quickly tapped his number in but the call immediately dropped. I did it again and the same thing happened. Twice more the call dropped before it even rang and I started to panic further. I wasn’t going to be able to reach him, I was going to bleed out until my hand dropped off.

Crying, moaning, taking short sharp breaths, I tried to work out what I should do. Then the phone rang. It was The Husband. I quickly told him what had happened and he ordered me to wrap a bandage around my wrist to stem the flow of blood into my hand and keep pressure on the wound. “Just like before, remember?” he said, soothingly. I immediately began to feel calmer as I obeyed his measured instructions. He offered to drive home and take me to the hospital but I told him to call back in half an hour – if my thumb was still bleeding then, he should come back. I hung up, cleared up the blood splatters in the sink, on the worktops, floor and wall tiles and even continued with some work, typing one-handed, injured hand propped up on my head. As agreed, exactly thirty minutes later The Husband called and I delicately peeled back the padding on my thumb. “Oh thank goodness, it’s-“ was as far as I got before the blood started pumping out of the cut again, staining the kitchen crimson. “I think you’d better come back,” I said with resignation.

However, when he walked in half an hour later and unbandaged my thumb, the bleeding had miraculously stopped. He cleaned up the shallower cuts on a couple of my other fingers, before starting on Big Red. My thumb looked like the Michelin Man but it was going to be OK. I wasn’t going to lose it. What a day. This wasn’t quite how I wanted to spend the first day of the festive season but I suppose the deep red of my blood was at least a Christmas colour.