Thanksgiving. We had moved to middle of nowhere New Mexico the year before and while a lot of kids were singing "over the river and through the woods", my kids were whining "can we turn on the air conditioner?"
My eldest, bless her heart, wanted to do Thanksgiving dinner all by herself. I, who hated to cook, said "sure, why not". My wife, who was normally like Martha Stewart on meth during the holidays, decided it was OK to put away her recipe for homemade cranberry free cranberry sauce, and let her have at it.
The process was going well, as far as we could tell. The turkey was smelling great, the potatoes weren't lumpy, and the green bean casserole had those fried onion thingys on it.
Now, at this point, we're not sure what happened. Maybe the dog was getting into the garbage, maybe gravity decided it was time to play a practical joke. But whatever happened, a can with the lit still attached to it and poking out with it's cartoony jagged edges just waiting for someone to come by.
Unfortunately, it was the chef.
Suddenly, there's a scream from the kitchen. My wife and I take of running to see what happened.
Now, I think of my self as a tough guy. Granted, I wasn't a jock in school or anything like that, but I think when the spit hits the spam, I can hold my own.
The events that follow are reconstructed from what others have told me because the moment I looked into the kitchen, I went over like a cheap lamp. Apparently, blood and I aren't friends.
Our chef had a cut on her foot from the can lid. If you look at your foot, you can see a blood vein running across the top of it. The cut was right through there, and deep enough to need stitches. It wasn't super serious, but since it hit that vein, it bled a lot.
A lot.
So here I am, Mr. Tough Guy who thinks when the robot-alien-zombie-nazi apocalypse comes, he'll be all Bruce Campbell on their butts, running to the kitchen to the rescue, only to end up face planting on the carpet.
Apparently, when the robot-alien-zombie-nazis attack, I will pass out and miss all the action. They won't even bother assimilating me because I'm totally a wuss.
So, apparently, what I tried to do was call an ambulance because I was totally sure that she was bleeding out and was going to die. I managed to get up and get to the phone, but when I looked back at the scene, which in my mind was a recreation of a scene from a Wes Craven movie, I ended up face down again.
My wife, totally calm, begged me to sit down. She was sure that I was going to fall and split my head open on the dining room table or something, which was a very real possibility. The last thing she needed was to have to take two of us to the emergency room for stitches. But NO! I was a MAN! I was going to do what I had to do. Unfortunately, I really had no idea what that should be because all the blood was rushing from my head and I couldn't really see from my view of the carpet what needed to be done.
In the end, Mom saved the day, dad proved how much of a wuss he was, and the other kids cleaned up the blood because it was really only a few drops. The moral of the story is, don't go to dad when you're bleeding.
