Saturday, November 10, 2007
|Bureaucracy for the good of all mankind.|While I like to think of myself as a rational person, I'm aware that I am also super paranoid and cautious. I step out of elevators quickly because I'm afraid that the cable will snap just as I'm stepping off and I'll get sliced in half (actually, I imagine the resilience of the human spine would prevent slicing and more like a scrunching, but fatal all the same). I always carefully watch elderly women on the street (regardless of race or comportment) because I think, "Who else has a better element of surprise?!" I'm sure that one of them will eventually attempt an attack on my person and I have to be ready.At the gym, I've given a great deal of thought to the many ways I could hurt myself or someone else or be hurt by someone else. And I consciously do my best to avoid all of them. But there was one thing that never ever occurred to me: that I could scrape my hand across the surface of one of the metal weightlifting bars and in doing so get multiple shards of metal caught in my finger. No ma'am. Not once had that possibility been spied on the horizon.And today I paid for my inchoate foresight.I brought my injury to the attention of the Coles administration who admitted to me that they could not help me. Without an athletic trainer around to administer aid, the Coles staff were prohibited by NYU rules from doing anything more than directing me to the medical center. As the guy put it, "I'm not even allowed to give you a bag of ice."Swell, I thought. The best they could do was call a van to drive me the five blocks to the medical center.At the center, after waiting far less time than I would have expected, a very friendly doctor froze my finger, used a scalpel to scrape off top layers of the skin of my finger to get to the metallurgical antigens, and then a very well-dressed female Asian nurse entered the room to give me a tetanus shot. She was from the "fast is best" school of shot administration, as the needle was in my left arm before the door had fully closed from her entrance. Then, as she was putting a bandaid on my arm, she said, "I heard there were multiple pieces in there. Thank goodness you decided to come in here rather than having someone at the gym try to get them out with tweezers, huh? Plus, the shot."I thought, "I didn't decide to come here, I had to come here."I had to go in there and, yeah, thank goodness.
promulgated by SWS2.1 at 13:03.
0 comments
0 Comments:
________________________