One afternoon while we were living in Arizona, I was napping and Dan was in the kitchen in the beginning steps of making an apple pie. This is a pretty typical set-up for our weekend: me, sleeping off the black storm cloud, Dan whipping up something delicious in the kitchen. I’d just faded off into some wispy reverie when I heard a yelp from the kitchen, followed by repeated, emphatic declarations of FUCK. My sleep had been disturbed, sure, but I wasn’t exactly alarmed, as Dan is prone to florid expressions of rage at his most frustrated. He gets pretty frustrated in the kitchen.

But the FUCKing didn’t stop, and was followed by my name being called in a strange, plaintive cry that I can only describe as sounding like italics.

I wearily stumbled out of bed, propelled only by my heart rate, which was suddenly skyrocketing at the thought of what mayhem I might encounter in our cheerful yellow kitchen.

Dan stood over the sink with a wad of paper towels clutched against his right index finger.

“I think I have to go to the emergency room,” he said. I started to take a step forward to check out the bloodshed in the sink, then thought better of it. Dan was getting weak-kneed due to either blood loss, or overreaction, so I shuffled him out into the truck and gunned it to the ER, which, luckily, was only a mile or two away.

While I drove, he told me what happened. He’d been making the pie crust, and thought he could use the immersion blender like a food processor to combine the butter and flour. A couple of whirs later, and he saw that the blade was all gunked up with butter. So he proceeded to clean it out. With his index finger. While accidentally pressing the power button.

My Harvard-educated husband had shredded his own finger in the immersion blender.

The ER was crowded with the usual suspects: stringy-haired, sniffling children and their grossly overweight guardians, shifty-eyed guys in dirty pants, ancient women with walkers looking like they were about to make an appointment with death. We watched more Geraldo than I’d ever seen before, and eventually went in to see the doctor.

Dan unrolled the giant wad of tissue to reveal his wound, which was not much more than a gash across the tip of his finger and finger nail. We were all pretty disappointed in the lack of gore.

The doctor didn’t miss a beat, though, he just strode over to his toolkit and whipped out the hospital-grade Krazy Glue.

“Like stitches,” he said, squeezing a clear, wormy tube of it over Dan’s exposed finger-innards.

He topped it off with a Band-Aid, which we later learned would cost us $700 (thanks Blue Cross Blue Shield!), and sent us on our way.
Dejected, but healed, we returned to our house to grumble about the wasted pie dough. Coming out of our back door was Dan’s sister, which was not so unusual, as she lived next door.

She explained that she had gone inside to finish off the pie crust for Dan, but then, she said, she did something really stupid.

Shrugging sheepishly, she held up her right index finger.