(One of) My Worst Nightmare(s)

An old medical joke compares the strategies that different types of doctors would use to stop a closing elevator door.  The internist would use his hand.  A surgeon, would be more leery of a hand injury, and so he would block it with his foot.  An orthopedist would put his head into the gap.  As a surgeon, my worst nightmare has always been getting a hand mangled in a garbage disposer.  I never dreamed that my cat could be a far greater threat. 

Denial of peril is a natural coping mechanism.  How else does one continue to function?  Like when I was Christmas shopping on Oxford street.  I found it a bit odd, but not worrisome, that there were suddenly guards at the entrance to Debenham’s, inspecting all the purses.  I didn’t find out until much later that the Wimpey’s next door had been bombed.  My mother, at home in Texas, watched it all unfold on television and thought I should come back home immediately.  That was back in the early 80’s, and the IRA was always blowing something up.  But I never felt personally threatened during my year in Britain, even when they blew up the Horse Guard parade an hour after our picnic in Regent’s Park.  The nurse from Northern Ireland said she felt much safer back home than in London, because in Belfast, you knew where the shooting and bombings occur.

Back to the cat.  His name is Amarillo and he has black and white tuxedo fur.  To be fair, he gave me ample warning.  We were changing planes in the Philadelphia airport, in one of those “Companion Care” rooms where you can lock the door.  I let my pet out of his carrier, so he could stretch his legs.  The old bathroom had been retrofitted with electric photo sensing faucets and soap dispenser, and a crude wooden box under the counter hid the plumbing and wires.  I didn’t notice the opening at the end of the box until it was too late.  Curiosity compelled Amarillo to leap through the perfectly cat-sized portal.  I reached in and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck so that he wouldn’t follow pipes and wires through a gaping hole into who knows what kind of netherworld.  When he slipped free, I grabbed his leg.  That must have hurt.  He growled and hissed, but I refused to release him until his teeth plunged into my hand.  Then, he was the one who wouldn’t let go.  Think of the Dune Trilogy pain box conceived by Herbert’s sadistic imagination.  When I finally managed to extricate my hand, it didn’t look that bad.  A little blood, a few poke marks, but everything worked.  Amarillo, to his credit, seemed genuinely stunned and remorseful, and retreated into his carrier. 

It was a three-hour layover and by the time we boarded the plane, my hand looked like a baseball.  My pain score was 9 out of 10.  It was worse than labor, because the agony was continuous.  Back in Florida, I had to take the cat home, empty the litter box, and fill up his food dispenser before taking myself to the Emergency Room.  They sent me home with pills, but by the next morning the swelling was half-way up my arm, with pus pouring out of a few orifices and red streaks approaching my elbow.  I spent three days in the hospital on IV antibiotics.  My right hand was useless, and for some reason the nurse in the ER put my IV in the bend of my left arm, so that side wasn’t much use either.  I couldn’t write, couldn’t type, and eating was a chore.  I watched a few bad movies and 6 consecutive episodes of Law and Order Special Victims Unit. 

I did get better and by the next week, I was back at work.  On Saturday, enter the tortoise.  My hand was 90% better.  It was still stiff and tender, and I was guarding it.  But I saw this reptile, a gopher tortoise, to be exact, trying to escape my back yard.   He was wedged against the fence. Who knows how he got in.  I ran out and carried him through the gate and watched the tall grass shudder in his path as he lumbered across the field.  On the way back into the house, I stopped to pull some weeds among the lantana.  Big mistake.  Searing pain.  I couldn’t see my attacker—probably a yellow jacket, maybe a bee.  Within an hour my hand was once again a throbbing orb and the itching and swelling extended above my elbow.   My sympathetic cat tried to lick it and make it better.

The hand is 99% normal today.  My husband, who was out of the country, has returned home.  I am back at work, able to perform surgery.  Still, I am apprehensive.

There is an old medical superstition that bad things come in three’s.  You see two stab wounds in the ER and you know it’s just a matter of time before someone comes in with a gushing jugular.  I feel like Sleeping Beauty on her 16^th birthday, dreading an encounter with a spindle.  I have decided that if I see any animals in distress, they can just do without my help.  Even if a bird flies into the window, or a baby squirrel fall out of the tree.  But what if the neighbor’s pig escapes again?