Well, most of my local friends are sick or lacerated or both right now. Me, I'm down with the second cold I've caught this month today.
Multiple lacerations amongs the braunbeck males. braunbeck was at work last night using a floor buffer when the machine got snagged on something. When that happens, the top will start to spin, so you're supposed to let go and step back. He did, but not quickly enough; one of the hard handles spun around and axed into the palm of his hand. He lost a chunk of skin and got a deep cut and bled all over the place.
I caught up with him at the emergency room last night; he'd already been there for two hours. The place was packed full of people with influenza; lots of sick babies in there, too. Although I feel for the folks with the flu, I really wished the hospital had thought to provide separate waiting rooms for those without influenza so as to not spread it around to everyone else.
If I catch the flu, I can't go home for Christmas. My mother on top of being 74 has a crack inside her skull from her pituitary tumor so that there's a passage between her sinuses and her brain. If she gets a sinus infection, it could kill her. I can't bring sickness home to her, and I only get to see her twice a year. Flu bad.
But back to braunbeck. After two more hours of standing around trying not to breathe the air, we got escorted back to one of the ER's exam rooms. The physician's assistant took his temporary dressing off. The cut went down almost to his tendons; I'd never seen what human fat and muscle looks like up close before. The anaesthetic shots looked like they hurt like a bitch, but it wasn't so bad when they sewed him up. I'm hoping our nurse-in-training housemate can take the nylon sutures out later; It'd be nice not to have to try to get a doctor's appointment with all the flu going around.
This morning, we learned that braunbeck's nephew Eric was tripped in the schoolyard by another student. Eric fell face-first onto some rocks, shattering his glasses and imbedding glass in his eye. Ack. His mom was of course really freaked out, but so far it looks like the glass didn't hit his cornea, lens or his retina, so he might be okay after some minor surgery and a few weeks of wearing an eyepatch. There were plenty of witnesses so the other kid's parents are going to pay the medical treatment costs, which I shudder to consider.