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A Christmas Miracle?

We were still living in Florence, two American senior citizens sheltering in place during the second lockdown. One thing we all knew well was that people who went into hospital during Covid tended not to come out. So the last thing we would willingly do is admit we might need medical help that would involve anyone breathing at us.

Except for one hour of physical therapy every week, I had not been outside of our rental house in Florence for months. The Hub kept reminding me that books won’t write themselves, and I should get busy before the pandemic became the zombie apocalypse. But… I couldn’t write because my house was trying to kill me.

First it was the laundry. Since clothes dryers were apparently illegal in Florence, we had to hang our laundry out to dry. Since it rained almost every day in October, I had to hang it inside our kitchen. Since I’m a devout klutz, while trying to shake out our sheets, I managed to crack my finger against the corner of a table. Since I knew that every hospital emergency room was full of potential murderers waiting to breath their covid-infused air my way, I of course turned to Dr. Google and her sidekick, Nurse Amazon.

My new fashion accessory–the splint. I think everyone will be wearing them soon.

 

I had finally jettisoned the splint, and was rejoicing in my refound ability to type the lettters Q, A, and Z. Christmas had arrived, along with our pandemic limited once-a-week grocery delivery and I was making our Christmas dinner.

All was going well until I tried to use the immersion blender to make a crumb topping for the pie. I’d just put in the very last shreds of butter when the blender died. It was the kind with a dead man’s switch that only blends when you’re actively pressing the power button. (Anybody care to guess where this is going?) So there I was with a deceased blender, the very last of the butter wrapped around its cold dead blades, and at least a week until the next grocery delivery. I stuck my finger into the blades to scoop up the rest of the butter.

What happened next was closer to inevitable than miraculous. The blender, with nothing remotely near to press its switch, rose from its deathbed and proceeded to blend the hell out of my poor finger. I wasted a moment gaping, and then further moments screaming, before I finally unplugged the thing.

All I could think was I could NOT afford to lose anything I was cooking for Christmas dinner because of the aforementioned butter shortage. So I wrapped a napkin, two tea towels, and a face towel from the clean laundry around my (don’t look, don’t look, EWWWWW!!) finger and noticed someone was still making a huge racket. Oh yeah, that would be me.

By now, the Hub and the dog were both there trying to help. He peeled back my gory wraps, made yuck faces, and called 911. Then he hung up, googled “emergency number in Italy” and dialed 112. The fun began as he tried to use Google Translate to convey “finger tartare”. (I’m almost positive I heard the word “hamburger”…)

Finally a lovely lady demanded to speak to me. “Do you need to go to hospital? Should we send an ambulance?”

Immediately I had visions of virus-intensive hospital air swirling around my defenseless finger. Huge invisible germs waiting to pounce.

“Um… couldn’t we just do one of those video calls where you tell us how to sew it up ourselves?”

She wasn’t in favor of that idea (although the Hub looked intrigued). Finally we agreed to just see how things went after dinner.

And that’s when it happened. The Christmas Miracle. The Hub, who in the 40+ years we’ve been married, had yet to cook anything with a longer recipe than “Pierce the film”—the man who gave his children microwaved plain potatoes and told them it was “dinner”, the same man who thinks the inventor of Ready Meals should get the Nobel Prize and possibly sainthood—uttered the immortal words, “I’ll finish making dinner.”

I had to stand there, bloody appendage elevated (and darn it all for not being a middle finger), and talk him through each step. But at the end, we had our Christmas dinner. He had to cut up my turkey for me, but it was delicious.

Mystery for the ages: we only pulled two Christmas crackers, but I was still finding bits from them days later.

I never did go to the hospital. I squirted on antibiotic cream like it was ketchup, and wrapped it in bandages, all while trying not to look. I even figured out how to type with the bandage on. I told the Hub he could cook dinner from now on and he wondered if it was worth running a finger or two through the blender himself.

🎄🎄God bless us every one.🎄🎄

 

Please see this entire series for tales of how medicine and travel intersected for me.