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I didn’t know that it was possible to be mad at a piece of kitchen equipment, but it totally is. Right now I am so furious at my pan that I am may very well use a metal fork on it the next time I scramble my eggs (OH THAT’S RIGHT, YOU HEARD ME).
(Before I keep going, I think you should probably know that I am on a killer combo of narcotic pain medication and two and a half hours of sleep right now. Highly recommended.)
(Also wait, come to think of it, I have definitely been mad at kitchen equipment before. #microplane #neverforget)
See, the thing about my fancy pan that I ordinarily love very much (but do not today) is that it has a fancy handle that doesn’t heat up, so you can pick it up with your bare hand even after cooking an entire meal with it. Neat, right? So last night I went and did just that – picked it up with my bare hand – not realizing that the handle had apparently been sitting too close to the flame underneath the pot sitting on the stove next to it. And apparently my fancy pan’s handle has two possible temperature settings: Lovely and Cool, and Fire Sword.
When I was in fourth grade, I was the Maid (complete with ruffly apron) in a little play that my class put on. My only job in this role was to walk on stage, discover a dead body, do the Janet Leigh in Psycho scream, then curtsy and walk off stage.
That scream was PEANUTS compared to the sound I made last night. Fourth-grade me would have been truly inspired.
I think it’s safe to say that the scream that I emitted when my brain finally processed the fact that my hand was being cooked was a loud one, because I completely scared the pants off of my children and Virgil, the latter of whom reacted by launching himself onto my favorite chair and peeing a bit (you know, just to make sure I knew he’d really prefer me not to make quite so much noise).
So did I take a load off, sit down, and take a minute to adequately care for my injury?
I think you know the answer to that question by now.
I spent the next few hours dedicating myself to the pursuit of martyrdom (I am very good at this) and insisting that I was fine while cooking dinner, making beds, and straightening the house with one hand, while the other hand sat in an ice bath that I carried with me from room to room.
And then, around 11PM, I noticed that my hand was about twice the size that it should have been, and that my rings – which would no longer come off – were slowly embedding themselves into my body as a result, and thought, “hm.”
Yeah yeah, I should have taken them off at the beginning. I know.
So I decided I needed to go to the emergency room.
OK, so now I have a job for you: Try to picture the total, abject patheticness of walking into an ER waiting room only to find a lady wearing her favorite (read: saddest and most unflattering) sleep pants, crying forlornly into the bowl of water sitting on her lap and sort of swirling her hand around inside it in search of an unmelted ice cube hiding somewhere in its depths. Whatever you are picturing, I was much, much more pathetic than that.
Because, you see, when you’re a mom of two little kids and it’s 11 o’clock at night and you have to go to the emergency room, you’re not only wearing unflattering pants and crying – you’re wearing unflattering pants and crying alone.
At this point, I thought I had finally arrived at the good part of the night: the part where they would give me drugs. They did indeed give me morphine, and numbing stuff, but nothing worked and so they eventually gave me my ice back and told me to go home.
So I sat on the curb in the dark with my bag of bandaging supplies and my bowl of water, and called an Uber, whimpered all the way home, and slept with my hand submerged in a bowl of water.
The silver lining on all this? I totally did not pee in the bed.
(My daughter did that for me.)
(And on me.)
The end.
