Avocado of Doom
I’m good in emergencies, I swear.
I’m good in emergencies. My wife will tell you the same. In the movie, I’m the guy who shakes the hysterical person and says,
“Look at me! We are going to survive this. Sure, that crossing guard over there whose ham hocks are on fire probably isn’t going to make it, but you and me? We’ll meet our great grandchildren someday if you do exactly what I say.”
Delegation and tone are key in an emergency.
You never behave like this: “Holy god, we need help! All these senior citizens’ hips are breaking. For fuck’s sake, who greased the linoleum ramp with Crisco!”
Instead, take a deep breath and delegate. One by one, point at the people who aren’t yet drowning in shock at the sight of broken bones.
“You, Bernie, get a mop and some degreaser. You, Carmelita, pick up Estelle’s teeth off the floor, especially that gold incisor. She’s gonna need to melt that down for her co-pay — and later remind me to send a strongly worded letter to those evil bastard lobbyists and their spineless congressional lap dogs.”
To be clear, this is advanced emergency strategy. Hard to teach. A lot of it is instinct.
Anyhow, as I said, I’m generally calm in an emergency, so that’s how my wife knew the situation was bad when I screamed, “Shit. Honey. Shit, shit, shit, shit…”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s bad.”
“Okay, remember what you tell me. Be the person you can count on in an — ”
“I can see the bone.”
“Okay, um…”
“A man should never see his own bones!”
I looked down and caught Captain Banjo Butterbuns up to no good. “Banjo, stop licking my blood off the hardwood.” Our Basset Hound devolves to his basest, most opportunistic instincts given the chance. My wife crated our naughty boy hound, wrapped up my lacerated hand in a sunflower-patterned dish towel, and drove me to urgent care.
It was the opposite of my intention. The entire reason I cut into the avocado was to make avocado toast for my wife after a walk in the park that was meant to quell my anxiety (Note: this sentence is likely the frontrunner for the whitest thing written today). The idea was to perform an act of kindness, to be present, so that the anxiety would subside.
Clearly, I underestimated my inner rage. I had been working on a project that required multiple rounds of meetings with data scientists, c-suite executives, and corporate attorneys — and that’s three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (if you’re keeping score). So I wasn’t a human man at this moment, I was a teeth-gnashing double-headed dragon straight out of Revelations, brimming with great vengeance and furious anger, all directed at an avocado.
“So how did this happen?” the doctor asked.
“Well, doc, I cut an avocado in half with a butter knife, and then I slapped the blade of the butter knife into the pit, the same way I’ve done dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Then, when I went to twist the pit from the avocado, I must have used too much force because the butter knife cut through the pulp, the peel, and right into the base of my knuckle.”
“A butter knife did that?!”
“Yup.” My wife showed a picture of the butter knife, which had a smear of blood and avocado about 3/4 of an inch deep on the blade. I would post the picture here, but it seems a little grisly for those among us with weaker stomachs. Interested parties who enjoy the macabre should DM me and I’ll happily send the horror show along.
The doctor stitched me up. Two internal stitches and nine external ones right at the base of my knuckle. As she was sewing me up, she kept repeating how lucky I was that it was “a clean cut.” Which seemed odd because nurses kept coming in and out of the room to deliver surgical tools that were, for whatever reason, not working. The word “sterile” didn’t really come to mind as much as the words “foot traffic” and “medically inept.”
Still, she sent me home with just shy of a dozen stitches that made the pointer finger on my left hand appear Frankenstein-ian. And she added, again, that it was “a clean cut” and insisted that antibiotics were unnecessary. In case you’re not picking up on it, this is foreshadowing. Shit is about to go sideways.
Three days before I was supposed to get the stitches out, my father- and mother-in-law were over and asked how the hand was doing. I showed them, and they had that look on their faces, the look that says, “Wow, if this plays out how it looks like it’s going to play out, we might have to update our wills to account for our soon-to-be dead son-in-law.” As vehemently as the doctor insisted I didn’t need antibiotics, my in-laws insisted I needed a second opinion.
“So how did this happen?” the next doctor asked. I gave him the story and removed the bandage —
“A butter knife did that?!” he asked.
“Yup, and now my in-laws think it’s infected.”
“Your in-laws are right!” he said. It was swollen and dark red around the stitches, and the threads felt like they were cutting into my flesh. He cut the stitches out and put two strips of medical tape across the cut that felt like they could have held The Titanic together. Then he told me to go immediately to a hand specialist the next morning.
My hand looked okay, I thought, and I tried to blow off the hand specialist, but my wife is smarter than me, and she made me go. We were early, so we stopped to grab a cup of coffee, and when I was in line I noticed my hand in the reflection of the pastry case. It looked peculiar. By peculiar, I mean that it looked to be the size of a grapefruit or a newborn baby’s head. The newborn baby head is probably a better comparison since newborn baby heads are creepier more often than not.
We rushed into the specialist’s office and got into a room pretty quickly. A nurse came in and cut the tape. When she cut the second strip of tape, that’s when it happened.
It’s difficult to describe. Not because I don’t have the words but because I have to reimagine it to come up with the words, and the image is not exactly up there with my wife’s beautiful blue eyes or the sunrise I saw after an all-night rager in Florence. That said, here goes.
It squirted.
Like, a little geyser. The infection just kind of sharted out of the cut. The nurse’s eyes bulged. She immediately wiped up the grossness with gauze and then covered my hand with a towel.
“Is that in case I’m one of those guys who faints in moments like these?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. The subtext? That was disgusting. I’m a trained medical professional, and I might pass out if I have to continue looking at your Texas Chainsaw Massacre-caliber avocado wound. “Doc will be in in a minute.”
A moment later the doc came in reading my chart. He was jolly and mirthful. “Let me guess,” he said. “You cut your hand with an avocado.”
“Yup,” I said.
He fist-pumped — no shit, he actually fist-pumped — and said, “Yes, nailed it.”
“Butter knife got away from me.”
“Let’s have a look,” he said, removing the towel.
“A butter knife did that?!” This was a refrain I would hear at least twenty-seven times over the next few hours. “You need to go to the emergency room. Now. I’ll phone over and tell them you’re coming.” The next minute or so was a blur, but I remember hearing the words infection, IV antibiotics, overnight stay, amputation, and sepsis.
We checked into emergency and that name is a little bit of a misnomer since it was a few hours before I got into a room. However, I did have blood drawn by three more medical professionals, all of whom said, “A butter knife did that?!” and then repeated in no particular order those same words: infection, IV antibiotics, overnight stay, amputation, and sepsis.
After one of the phlebotomy sessions, I returned to the waiting room, and found my wife looking a little pale. A large man, like easily seven feet tall and pushing 300 pounds, sat in the corner of the waiting room. Imagine a professional wrestler who never made it to the big time and instead became a file clerk.
Well, he adjusted himself as my wife looked up, moving his business from one side of his baggy sweats to the other and, well, let’s just say if this guy had been a professional wrestler, an appropriate handle would have been Dong-zilla.
Nothing like gossiping about a strange man’s penis to pass the time during a potentially life-threatening medical debacle. Did he injure himself and swell up? A little blue pill malfunction? A House MD-level case of late-onset below-the-belt elephantiasis?
Finally, we were admitted. My wife stepped out to call her parents and make arrangements for our kids. I walked into my room, greeted by two nurses, each one attractive with a warm smile. They introduced themselves and immediately started removing my clothes. I did not enjoy this nearly as much as I would have imagined.
I was reminded of my vasectomy when I was prepped by an overweight bearded man with a braided mullet. My brother-in-law was prepped by a woman he described as a Victoria’s Secret-quality beauty queen. We’ve debated a few times over who had a more uncomfortable situation. At last, I concede.
Off-the-charts vulnerability. As they removed my clothes, one of them produced a few thinly packaged wet towels and explained they would need to wipe me down from head to toe. “It optimizes surgical outcomes,” one of the nurses said. Add surgery to the list of infection, IV antibiotics, overnight stay, amputation, and sepsis.
“Uh, can my wife help wipe me down?”
“Oh, how sweet. Of course she can. There are six total, one for each appendage, one for the front torso and one for the back torso. Make sure she’s thorough.” And then they both left the room. I believe I interjected with that question right in time as they left me in my boxer shorts and I was allowed to don the hospital gown myself. Another second or two, and my Dong-zilla would have been exposed for all these nurses to see.
A few minutes later, my wife joined me and I filled her in, and it may as well have been a birthday gift to her. The idea of wiping me down with cold wet towels, of tickle-torturing me at the insistence of medical professionals and in the interest of optimizing surgical outcomes? She was giddy with excitement.
Nothing like a good, ol’-fashioned, life-threatening laceration to embolden my wife with the sexist proclivities of a 1950s advertising executive. She violated me and loved every second of it. “Time to hit the undercarriage,” she said. Is there any more vulnerable place than the taint? It epitomizes human weakness. Achilles Heel? Bullshit. Should have been Achilles Taint.
Anyhow, my wife helped me prep for surgery, which was tentatively scheduled for the morning. The complexity of hands — of knuckles and carpals, phalanges and tendons — make it a terrible place for infection. Things can go sideways quickly, just like a mishandled butter knife.
They hooked me up to an IV drip, and my wife told me she was headed home to get some sleep and return before the surgery in the morning. She gave me a kiss and we both told each other that everything was going to be okay. Left alone with the beeps and vibrations of the ER, I thought about how angry I was just before I cut my hand and how joyful I was being tickled and tortured in an ER bathroom while my wife laughed her taint off.
I didn’t sleep much that night, so I had a lot of time to think. I’m in my forties, and I still fall prey to the idea that I’m more important than I am, that work is more important than it is, that anything less than absolute career success (whatever the fuck that is) is cause for crippling indignities, a total lack of self-worth, and an arsenal of self-directed shame.
I tried not to show pain, tried to disguise weakness, and my brain and body conspired against me so that the truth would out, even if it had to come out by way of grisly butter-knife violence and depravity.
You can have self-worth without being self-important. You can be passionate without being precious. And you can slice up an avocado without making a blood sacrifice.
The next morning, my wife and I met with the doctors during rounds. The infection had subsided. The IV worked. There would be no surgery, no amputation, no sepsis, and hopefully a lot more laughs. I’m left with the memories of blood and bone, images of Dong-zilla, and the presence of a Frankenstein-ian little scar, a constant reminder that this life need not be so serious.
