I hate to be one of those people that, whenever you've got a story, they've got a story to top your story, but - did you have an exciting weekend? I bet it wasn't as exciting as mine, and my four-hour stay in the emergency room!

[grossness to follow - skip if you're squeamish. I mean, obviously I'm still alive.]

Saturday night I was taking my bubble bath and I needed to shave my legs. With my first swipe of the razor, I opened a gash in my leg from ankle to knee. Very much not good. I use ordinary disposable razors; the business end consists of a little plastic frame with two sharp metal bands inside it. I don't know how it happened, but somehow one end of the little metal bands had got bent upwards, so when I made my swipe, I gouged a furrow out of my lower leg. The worst part was that I was sitting in warm water and even once I got out, I couldn't get it to stop bleeding. Alan had already gone to bed but I had to yell for him. He wanted to take me to ER, which I didn't think my cut was necessarily bad enough to warrant, but I was worried about infection and the bleeding and so forth, so we wrapped my leg in a towel and off we went.

Every woman I had to talk to about my injury - the triage nurse, the admin/billing person, the doctor - made this identical eyes-scrinched up, teeth-clenched grimace when they heard how I'd managed to hurt myself. The doctor decided that it wasn't deep enough to require stitches; she said all that would accomplish would be a railroad-track scar, so they actually glued my leg back together with some special skin-safe Super Glue called Dermabond. I had to have a tetanus shot, too. I hate the needles. Hate them, I tell you!

There were some seriously skanky people in the emergency room, too. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, Saturday night in the big city and all. I'm just glad it wasn't a full moon. After I'd seen the triage nurse and been gauzed, but was waiting to see the doctor, some cops walked in with a girl in handcuffs. She kept stretching her cuffed hands from one side of her back to the other, like she was trying to get loose, but she was a tiny, petite thing and the cop was at least six feet tall, so I don't know what she thought she'd accomplish - she didn't seem drunk, trotting around under her own power as directed by the cop, so I guess it was either a drug issue or some traffic offense - there had been a traffic accident right before we'd arrived, which is one reason we had such a long wait. Maybe it was her fault or she was unlicensed or something.

As for me, since I had the tetanus shot I didn't require antibiotics. It's not that serious a wound, but they don't want me to walk on it at all for the next three days, so the DermaBond will hold and the skin can start to heal. Oh no. The horror. Three whole days lying in my comfy feather bed, under doctor's orders. So that's not so bad but all things considered, I'd rather not have slashed myself.