We had dinner with neighbors Sunday night. Really interesting people, and their son is a well-known comic book writer & artist (to those who know comics, that is ; ). They came by for cocktails and then we agreed to caravan to dinner.
The neighbors drove away and my father went to shut the back hatch on our car in the garage so he could pull it out into the driveway. He was lowering the hatch as I was about to get into the back seat when I heard him calmly say, "Oh dammit." When I looked up, blood was pouring down his face. Instead of shutting the hatch, he slammed the corner of it into his noggin, resulting in a deep cut.
I ran him into the house and grabbed a towel. Amazingly, he managed to hold his head out from his body to prevent bleeding on his nice shirt, but as he tried to rinse his head in the sink, it seemed to create more blood. It was a spectacular pre-dinner show. Who knew Dad was such a bleeder?
I kept thinking, what will the neighbors say when we show up late with my dad's head bleeding profusely?
The bleeding subsided after some pressure, then we threw a band-aid on his dome & headed out to chow. Dinner was great, but throughout the evening, I kept noticing the band-aid getting redder and redder. After dinner we convinced my dad to stop at an urgent care clinic to see if they thought it might require anything more than hydrogen peroxide & a bandage.
Turns out the "urgent" care clinic is more of a "hope we're open when you need us" clinic - closed after 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays. We reasoned that my dad would likely still be alive in the morning and if the cut was still bleeding, he'd go back to have it looked at.
As luck would have it, it's already starting to heal and he found an actual doctor to look at it today. Doc said it was doing fine and commended our field dressing & first aid skills. My mother is now known as Nurse Ratched.
That's blood on the floor of the garage.
That's a nice slice of prime rib.
It's strange that just about every time I'm vacationing with my parents, something happens that results in one or all of us getting hurt.
When I was 15 we took a small RV all through the Pacific Northwest and I got my thumb smashed in the door. Then when my dad stomped on the gas pedal I was thrown backward into the corner of the fridge, right between the shoulder blades.
Then at one campsite we were picking blackberries and a swarm of bees came upon us. As I was sprinting back to the RV, I heard my dad yelling, "watch out for snakes!" That wasn't a great time.
While on a road trip in Europe not so long ago, we went to get the car out of the hotel garage and noticed a chlorine smell, but didn't think much of it. As the elevator descended to the garage the smell got stronger and stronger.
Soon we were choking on chlorine gas and running for the emergency exit. Concerned that our car and luggage were left unattended, we all held our breath and ran back in to get the car. Why? I have no idea. We're Americans. We can't leave a perfectly good car AND luggage in a garage. That's stupid.
After waiting for what felt like a day or the garage gate to open, we drove around front and went in to tell the manager they were poisoning their guests in the garage.
They seemed annoyed at us and said they'd check it out, but we were convinced they thought we were raving idiots. They gave us bottles of Evian and sent us on our way. We drove for an hour with the windows down, coughing, trying to sooth our burned throats with French mineral water and cold air.
Another time in Portugal, my mother had the mussels and really shouldn't have. She spent that night in the loo, cursing the restaurant, the Portuguese and our lack of Pepto Bismol.
It's a rich tradition - vacation means adventure, and with adventure, comes the risk of injury. We go boldly forth and keep our first aid kits handy.
