Keep Your Chin Up

My chin.

So sorry for the delay in updates, but on my way to FedEx and Bed Bath & Beyond on Tuesday I tripped and ripped open my chin. It was around four pm and on 21st street outside a valet/parking place. This woman who saw me fall (I tripped on the driveway right in front of her SUV) started screaming when she saw me. I hadn't realized how bad my trip was until I looked down and saw blood pouring out of my chin. She was screaming "you need to go to the hospital! you need stitches!" and the valets looked terrified and had me look in a car side mirror and that's when I saw it. I saw the gaping hole that looked like someone had stuck their finger in a raw hamburger patty that was my chin. And I knew just then that shit, yes, I needed to go to the hospital.

The woman wanted to drive me but I took a cab. I called my friend Alice who works at Sound Lounge as their awesome marketing coordinator and started crying in the cab, blood pouring all over myself and the cab and the bag of Bed Bath & Beyond supplies to return and the purses to mail via FedEx and I was hyperventilating and the cab didn't seem to know where to go with the command "nearest hospital." Alice told me to take it easy and I was just sobbing and blood wouldn't stop gushing and the cab driver gave me his Subway Sandwich napkins but those were soaked through.

The cabbie was so freaked out that he drove onto the sidewalk outside Bellvue Hospital thinking it was an emergency ramp and then the cops were yelling at him and I was still crying and trying to figure out how to pay him and the cops saw me and let him go and I paid and got out of the cab and saw everyone staring at me. I walked as calmly as I could through the remarkably modern and clean hospital entry rooms and into the ER, which was like walking into a movie set because holy shit, those shows have it right. The place was a hell hole of humanity run by caring people trying to do their job but god there are a lot of assholes out there.

So they saw me and this nice lady cop helped me figure out where to go and then I was put in the suture ward which is where they also store the crazies so I was surrounded by people in handcuffs with cops guarding them and I had no phone service so I couldn't text or call Nick or my mom... and finally a doctor saw me and said it was a clean wound, but I'd need two to three stitches. I ended up with three. They gave me tylenol.

I have this memory of lying back in the stretcher and thinking how weird it was because I knew the new doctor who took over, this female doctor, was putting a shot of some sort of anesthesia in my chin. Like she was putting a shot directly into the open flaps of the skin in my face and I didn't care. By then I had had a painful tetanus shot and had my chin ripped open. And then I laid back and watched upside-down as she sutured my chin shut.

Then I left. And I threw out the bag of Bed Bath and Beyond returns and purses because it was covered in my blood and I wanted no memory of what had happened.

Then I went back to work because I felt bad. I guess this means I have a good work ethic?

I blame the move for this. If I hadn't had to mail more shit to my cousins, if I hadn't had to return things to Bed Bath & Beyond, I wouldn't have been carrying such a heavy bag that knocked me over after the original trip onto my knees. But it's my own fault. Shit happens.

As my dad says, keep your chin up!

My chin the next day, post stitches.