Last night we’d planned BBQ butterflied chicken (with the incredible lillie’s carolina bbq sauce) and this really great shaved brussels sprout salad with walnuts and apples for dinner.

Thinly slicing the brussels sprouts for the salad is really time consuming and fiddly, so we decided that our brand-new mandoline would be much more efficient.

We avoided getting a mandoline for a really long time because we knew mandoline injuries were a *thing*. But we vowed to be careful and always to use the guard. What we didn’t expect was one of the brussels sprouts to flip, taking the guard with it and dragging Don’s index finger across the blade.

And so after a quick consult with the InformationSuperhighway, off to the hospital it was. We acted pretty quickly to staunch the bleeding with a tea-towel, elevate, turn off the BBQ, grab shoes and race out the door.

hospital fashion

On the way there, Don remembered that I had put a frying pan on the stove waiting to toast walnuts. I tried to call Joe/Frank to have him turn it off, but he was in the shower and wasn’t picking up. ACK! So I dropped Don off, parked, filled out his intake form and came home to turn the burner off. Then back to the hospital which fortunately is pretty close by.

While all this was going on, Don was triaged – and then the waiting began.

He waited THREE HOURS before he was seen. I’ve had several emergency room visits over the years and this is the longest I’ve ever had to wait (except for those 5 hours I sat in the waiting room in 1989 while in the midst of a miscarriage). It wasn’t even particularly busy – it really brought home how increasingly under-funded our public hospitals are.

A couple of hours in, we did ask if there was anywhere else we could go and suggested maybe we should leave and just see the GP in the morning, but the very strong advice was that we stay and wait.

Once we eventually got through the door into the emergency room proper, it was fabulous – very professional and efficient, though it did take a couple more hours. The poor finger was cleaned, wrapped, tetanus shots given, prescription for antibiotics provided. Sights you really don’t want to see ever in your life include your husband’s finger bone. Don will need to see the GP on Monday (to check how it is healing) and visit the plastic surgeon on Thursday (more a just-in-case thing than anything).

We didn’t get to bed until 2am, which given that we’d been awake since 6:30am made for a VERY long day.

What an adventure!

The challenge now is to entertain someone who cannot play golf or do anything fiddly for 6 weeks.