Tomorrow morning my friend Maggie comes into town and will be hanging out with me for a few days. It’s her first time visiting California and I love that she gets to come while I’m on maternity leave (but finally feel myself enough to get out and do things) and we can spend time together. I’ve totally been looking forward to showing her around.
Today I am happy she is coming for an additional, slightly more selfish reason.
Let me explain.
Yesterday we had a super busy day. Matt was off in the morning to record his vocal contribution to an album David is putting together and so naturally I was with Genesis while he was gone. I needed to run to Target while he was out and get, among other things, stuff to make a side dish for this meeting we attended last night on Raising Children in God’s Word.
So Genesis and I set out and successfully got everything we needed. I carried her in the Baby Bjorn while I shopped since I had to get quite a few bulky things and needed a cart this time around. She was great, only got fussy once and I got her to calm down again so we could do what we needed to do. As a reward I bought her a few lacy headbands so when she wears green or yellow she won’t be mistaken for a boy baby.
She likes riding in the car. She usually cries a little when we first start out, but once we’re moving for awhile she settles in and usually goes to sleep. When I got back to the house she was being quiet and I assumed she was sleeping. I got out of my seat and was slowly closing my car door so it wouldn’t make a noise that woke her up. My fault came in deciding to look into the back seat to see whether she was indeed sleeping while I was shutting my door behind me.
You may have already guessed what came next. I closed the car door on my right thumb.
So now I had a painful injury that was demanding all of the focus of my entire body, a sleeping baby in the car (that’s right, I confirmed she was asleep so at least I got that out of the whole thing) and a trunk full of stuff that had to get carried in. I did the only thing that made sense: ran into the house basically screaming Matt’s name to get him to help me with everything in the car so I could give my thumb the attention it was screaming to get.
“I’m in the bathroom!” Matt yelled from the back of the house.
Panic set in. “Ok!” I feebly shouted back.
I then did what anyone would do, which is what needed to be done. I got all the bags in, I pulled her and her carseat out of the car and then started feeding her a bottle since she woke up during the whole ordeal and was now hungry.
Matt came out while I was feeding her and quickly picked up that something was Seriously Not Ok.
“I closed my thumb in the car door.” I told him through tears I had finally allowed to come, and he quickly went to get me some ice to put on it.
The ice helped some but didn’t do much to take away the pain. For the rest of the evening I became more and more aware of just how many things require my right thumb to be in working condition (spoiler alert: BASICALLY EVERYTHING REQUIRES YOUR RIGHT THUMB WHEN YOU ARE RIGHT HANDED). I think the true low point was when I tried to take notes on the teachings at the meeting we attended.
When we got back from the meeting Paul told me that our uncle Steve who is a carpenter and owns his own construction business (he’s the one who helped us build a wine rack on my birthday a couple of years ago) frequently deals with injuries similar to mine since he’s constantly using a hammer and sometimes they slip and hit fingers instead of nails.
Uncle Steve apparently deals with this injury by heating the end of a paper clip up to a red hot temperature and then touching it to a place on his nail where the blood has pooled. He may have to do this a couple of times, but ultimately he gets the result he’s looking for which is that the paper clip burns through the nail, which provides a hole for the blood to come out, thereby relieving the pressure.
Paul suggested I do this also.
I swiftly declined, deciding that was just a crazy homemade remedy my uncle came up with.
Later when I was pumping and had some time to kill, I decided to look up the injury online and see what suggestions the helpful People of the Internet had to give me. Low and behold, a website that seemed to be reputable outlined in great detail the exact same procedure Paul said my Uncle Steve used to relieve such an injury.
Matt came into the room and I told him about my discovery. I asked him if he thought I should do it and he shrugged noncommittally. I asked him if he would do it if he was me and he answered “yes” with no hesitation. The website said it should be a painless procedure since nails have no nerve endings and you don’t push down hard enough to hit skin and so I decided it was worth it.
We left our room and headed toward the kitchen. Matt went in search of a paper clip and I stopped by Paul’s bedroom to inform him I had decided to burn a hole in my finger.
“Sweet.” he said and came right out.
My resolve quickly faded when I actually had the red hot paper clip in front of me.
“You have to do it baby” Matt said “you’re the only one who will know how much pressure to put on it.”
I adamantly protested this option in a fashion that was much more becoming of a 7 year old girl than a 28 year old woman (Paul has this on video I believe). Ultimately, Matt agreed to be the one who did it and I was thrilled he agreed. I figured I would look away when he did it, he would maybe have to do it twice, I would get the blood out and then have a thumb that didn’t hurt anymore. Then we could all go to bed happy.
I tell you, the best laid plans…
Not only did it not take only two times, but the first hole we made I think was too close to my cuticle because at some point (maybe the third or fourth time we tried to get through) it felt like my thumb was on fire and I screamed, wrenched my hand away from Matt and ran to the other side of the kitchen. Matt looked devastated of course, not wanting to hurt his wife, and I started apologizing fervently.
“I think it’s just too close to the cuticle” I said “and that’s why it hurts. We must be hitting the cuticle a little.”
So we decided to make another hole further away from the cuticle, but still in the part of my finger that seemed to have the greatest collection of blood.
The outcome was the same. After the third or fourth try all of a sudden my thumb HURT LIKE A MOTHER and I ran away screaming. Matt threw the paper clip down, declared loudly that he was not doing this anymore, and went to our room.
Paul (sad that he did not get the bloody show he was hoping for) spent a good 5 minutes trying to get me to either squeeze my thumb so hard the blood came out or use one of the many trinkets on his multi purpose knife/tool to finish the job.
“Ab, what if you used this file to get down there? It’s a really good file.”
“No. I would have to file my whole nail down to the skin level. That would hurt like crazy.”
“Well what if you just used the tip of this scissor to make a little hole? We have to be so close.”
“No, Paul. I’m just going to have a thumb that hurts for a few days.”
“Do you want to just take this thing back to your room and check it out? There’s a lot of things on here you could use. ”
“I’M NOT DOING ANYTHING ELSE TO MY THUMB TODAY! NOW HELP ME PUT THIS BOTTLE TOGETHER. I’M INJURED.”
We all went to bed then, me with a fresh ice pack to cover my poor tortured thumb. It made for a somewhat restless night but I think the sleep I got helped it to heal some. Today it is less painful than yesterday, but still makes itself known every time I hit it on something or try to close snaps on GiGi’s clothes or try to twist a bottle cap on. Matt and Paul have been awesome in helping me do things today but as we all know, tomorrow is Monday and they must go back to work.
So I’m glad Maggie is coming since, if this continues to hurt, I will greatly appreciate assistance in a few things.
By the way, we were theorizing today on why it would have hurt me and Matt and I thought perhaps we had actually made it all the way through the nail and were hitting skin. We thought maybe we waited too long to try and get the blood out and it had congealed under the nail bed. That made me feel better until I realized if that was true then I had exposed skin under my nail and had a great potential for infection. Naturally, I decided this would be my demise and started giving Genesis life lessons to take with her. Once I had filled her head with the merits of listening to Celine Dion and the consequences of dressing like a hussy, Paul again offered his advice.
“Just put hydrogen peroxide on it, that’s how you’ll know if you hit skin.”
“But that will hurt.”
“No it won’t. It’s hydrogen peroxide.”
“Yes it will, it will sting and bubble and I think I’ve put my thumb through enough already.”
“Abby it won’t hurt. Trust me.”
I then started to tell Genesis to never listen to her Uncle Paul.
But then I went back to my room and tried it out. No bubbling. No stinging. Looks like we didn’t hit skin. I just have very thick, very sensitive nails.
And now I also have two holes in my thumb, making it impossible to cover the whole thing up with nail polish.
SO! The moral of the story is….don’t look for your sleeping baby while closing the car door and if you accidentally close your thumb in the door….don’t listen to your brother’s advice.
Notes From A Modern Day Queen 