keep your guard up

Sunday, December 19, 2004

yesterday, our gardener/landscaper/miscellaneous handyman extraordinaire cut half his nose off with a circular saw.

we don't know exactly how he did it, because circular saws come with guards to prevent gruesome accidents like this from happening; however, i hear it is not uncommon for construction workers and miscellaneous handymen extraordinaires to remove the guard because it slows you down. it unfortunately also transforms the tool into an efficient disfiguring device.

according to my dad, he's fine, but we're waiting to see if the piece of tissue my father rescued from the garage and hurried to the emergency room in a bag of ice will take, and there's always the question of infection. and apparently, it cut into his cheek and so we're waiting to see about that as well. but it could have been far, far worse. we think the saw hit a nail or something and bounced into the man's face. and i know this sounds terrible, but i'm happy to know he wasn't working on our house when he did it; one of our neighbors, impressed with the work he's done for us, hired him for some construction.

my father's demeanor throughout the ordeal was quite impressive. but then again, my father is no stranger to emergency situations. consider:

1 when i was 6, my father was in a 17 car pile-up. he was driving an old car with no seat belts. his left arm was broken, his jaw shattered, his face burned by chemicals from somewhere under the hood. it took almost a year for him to recover, though to this day there are still aftereffects from his injuries. in fact, they had to re-break his nose because it set improperly; my father, not willing to be aenesthetized, took local aenesthetic and was conscious while the doctor pounded away at his face with a hammer and chisel;

2 when i was 13 or 14, my father's thumb was nearly sliced off by a machine at work. he described to me later how it was attached to his hand by a thread of skin for an hour or so as he waited to be seen at the hospital. it was reattached and basically works;

3 when i was 17, my father had a stroke, destroying the part of his brain that controls equilibrium and his sense of temperature in half his body. it took him a few months to learn to walk again, as other parts of his brain took over for the section that was killed. he is nearly 100% recovered from this, save that half his body usually registers warmer than the other, which is kind of a pain in the ass.

and one can only conclude from this that my father's one tough son of a bitch. i would say that these events have given him a kind of nonchalance when it comes to emergencies, but that would be wrong. his basic attitude is oriented towards survival, towards doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done, and that attitude is what enabled him to get through everything he's gotten through. so when the landscaper came to our house, my father wasted no time getting him into the car and rushing him to the hospital.

now, personally, the flipside of this kind of disposition, at least in my father, is an inadequate ability to understand or deal with human emotions. you could say that a more balanced approach would exist somewhere between my father's utter lack of sensitivity and my constant need to wallow in my own feelings. however, i can't blame my emotional nature for the way i shut down during emergencies. for instance:

1 one day during my first semester of college, in my freshman seminar, the girl next to me laid her head down on my arm. as i got warm all over thinking this might be love, she started to twitch. this was less like a swoon and more like a seizure, and i quickly jumped back, her head thudding lightly upon my desk. we realized that she had given blood at the blood drive and was now losing consciousness, and while i stared, mute, frozen, two girls from across the room helped her to a clearing in the middle of the desks and laid her down. seeing a package of cookies on her desk, and wanting to do something to look less incompetent, i reached for them and struggled in vain for 30 seconds with the shrink wrap before my classmate next to me relieved me of my burden.

2 i was an RA during my sophomore year of college. a wildfire made its way to our campus and i had to evacuate the residence hall to the school's cafeteria. i had no problem disseminating the message, but had no ability to think of grabbing extra clothes, a jacket, my checkbook or wallet, etc. thankfully, freshman students were around to fill in the blanks for me.

my extremely few experiences in emergency situations tell me that, if anything ever happened that was seriously bad, and required quick attention, i would be the first person to jump up and begin to repeatedly run into the wall until i passed out. which might actually be better for the gene pool, when you think about it.

whereas my father's level-headedness makes him well suited to dealing with the kinds of situations children and teens can get themselves into (scrapes, broken bones, sucking chest wounds), my complete bewilderment during times of crisis suggests to me that the women of the world know something i am only beginning to figure out: we are a better world without my offspring in it.

at any rate, i wasn't in any mood to pick out a christmas tree yesterday.

my dad was.

he did a good job.

posted by The Train! | 4:26 PM