Tonight I am sharing my blog duties with Sarah.
And it’s all cause I have only just realised that dropping something can actually be a matter of life-or-death.
And I am only partly talking about the time I accidentally saved someone’s life. See this guy walking a few steps in front of me one time on Albert Street in the city suddenly dropped a piece of paper. And so after I had picked it up and chased the dude down and handed it back, he said quite convincingly, “Wow. You saved my life.” I like to think there was some perfectly explainable, but incredibly complex reason as to why that humble piece of paper was so vitally important.
But personally the closest I can think of where dropping something was so meaningful was at a massively crowded intersection in Brisbane just as everyone was going home. I was standing right on the curb waiting for the green man and then decided to fiddle with my iPod. And this was when iPods were still pretty brand new, very expensive and on that cusp of exploding in popularity and omnipresence. And then in a quite undignified fumble it suddenly lost the traction of my grasp and fell, smashing on the bitumen and bouncing across the road in an evil dance. I chased after and managed to quickly recover it just before it got too enamoured with this brand new activity. And I was so embarrassed I didn’t even inspect the damage – I just put it back in my pocket and tried to look as best as I could like this was no big deal — but I was weeping inside. And to make matters worse I could literally spidey-sense the snooty smirks all around. “Ha! Suck shit hipster,” they were all collectively thinking.
But this was nothing compared to something that happened to one of my good friends, Sarah, who had such an epic dropping-stuff-fail — that it almost killed her.
And I’ll let her outline the story.
It was one of those moments that moves in slow motion and you instantly regret…
It was Easter Thursday. I had been working late and by the time I managed to get dressed and head over to the party, I was well behind the group on the drunkness scales. Feeling a little unsure of myself I figured what better way to assimilate with a bunch of 20 year old drunks than to prove your youthfulness by downing a bottle of champagne and half a bottle of wine (the good stuff mind you, not the passion pop variety) in the time it took for iTunes to play the entirety of Taio Cruz’s Rokstarr?
With newfound confidence to boot, I strutted my stuff as I entered the living room where the party had shifted, when my killer high heels caught the edge of the rug. With a glass of wine in hand, I attempted to save myself on the nearby armrest of a couch. Having over estimated the length of arms, I missed the couch, and landed full weight on my right wrist. The wine glass hit the ground first, smashing into sharp shards of glass as my hand followed suit.
Blood was squirting out of my arm. I laid on the floor by the couch (an object so close to being my saviour, if only I had the long arms of a model), holding my wrist with all my might to stop the bleeding. It’s all a blur really, perhaps blocked from my memory. The hour wait for the ambulance was a little terrifying in retrospect, thank goodness I was in shock, as friends argued whether to wait it out or chuck me in the back of the cab and head for the hospital (but really, what cabbie in their right mind would drive me?).
One artery, one nerve and three tendons later, and all is well that ends well… I got to end my night with a party of one, in a morphine induced state of bliss, minus the 20 year olds.
I tried to capture how hideous this scar looked IRL – but kinda failed. If you scroll down to the end you will see Sarah’s pics. Very graphic – just a warning!
Holy shit huh?
Her recovery is still not exactly secure either. She has months and months and months of waiting before she knows if she’ll be anything like normal again. Poor Sez.
And this has made me even more scared of glass. Ever since I was young and some kid at a sleep-over convinced me that he “knew” someone who got this “glass splinter” (as opposed to a wood splinter). And he explained, quite late at night, perhaps with just a torch to light up his face – that that shard of glass had somehow entered the blood stream and then gradually worked it’s way into this person’s heart — and with every heartbeat it had stabbed away until the person was dead.
And so ever since I have been petrified of broken glass. Anytime I break glass I get ridiculously anal and vacuum the shit out of the affected area. When I left home for the first time, with the little money I had, I specifically budgeted for a kick-ass vacuum cleaner.
And to close I want to say something quite disgusting. Just cause it’s my blog. Deal with it.
One of the worst things you can drop – well apart from anything that could eventually kill you – is a toilet roll in the actual toilet-bowl right after you have done a number 2. And to somewhat explain I will say this: you have done your business, you look back triumphant, you go to grab a fist full of paper and you discover the roll is empty. Then you grab a new roll and attempt a change (just ’cause you are a fine household citizen) but your fingers fail and the brand new roll goes suicidal into the bowl. What you are left with is a very wet roll of sticky, stinky poo-flavoured paper that suddenly has gigantism. Totally.
DJ GLAD RAPPA 