Tonight’s the (mango) pits
posted in Injuries, OmegaDad |A PSA:
If you are interested in sharing the wonders and intricacies of the kitchen with your seven-year-old dotter, and you want to demonstrate to her that mango pits are hard and woody and stringy and stuff like that…?
Don’t use a dull-ish kitchen knife to jab at the mango pit.
Especially if that dull-ish kitchen knife has a nice sharp point.
Especially if your index finger is somewhere behind the mango pit.
Because what will happen is you will exclaim (loudly) (in front of the seven-year-old), “OH, SHIT!!!” when the knife rebounds off the mango pit and slices through your finger.
And then you will have to send your seven-year-old haring off for your wife, who is blissfully, quietly, peacefully sitting on the front porch soaking in the sun.
There will be a frantic interlude in the bathroom, with blood spurting everywhere and your dotter offering her hand-made first-aid kit as help.
And then the whole fam-damily will spend the next two hours getting you off to an (open) urgent care center, where the doctor and nurse will put you into a surgical room, clean and examine the wound, and let you know (by the way) that you actually went all the way through the finger and you might have severed your flexor tendon. And here’s the number of the orthopedic surgeon you need to call tomorrow morning. And here’s the splint for your finger, which you may need to wear for up to six weeks. And if you don’t wear the splint and bend your finger wrong, and you have harmed the flexor tendon, it will snap and retreat up the inside of your arm and the surgeon will need to stick a wire up your arm and fish around looking for the tendon, and, and, and…
At which point, your wife will flinch and hunker down and cover her ears because, dayum, she so does not want to hear this graphic detail, thankyewverramuch.
And then the whole family will wander off to the nearest pharmacy that is still open to get pain killers and antibiotics ASAP.
And then the whole family will go off to IHOP for dinner and have the worst dinner possible. (I had something that purported to be chicken crepes florentine. There were, somewhere inside these things, small pieces of spinach. There was, on the outside, a drenching of some coagulated yellow gravy stuff. There were many pieces of chicken and onion. Isn’t spinach much cheaper than chicken?!)
Anyway, this is your PSA for the day: Mangoes are dangerous.
