Boo-Boo

I tried to slice my arm open yesterday afternoon. Not intentionally, mind you, but did it just the same. I had taken an armload of stuff I was getting rid of out to the dumpster. They recently replaced the old-style dumpster with a new one. The old ones were about shoulder high, flat on the top, and had three sections (front, middle, back), with two doors each section. The new style are not as long as the old ones, are a bit taller, and only have two open sections on top (front and back), with doors on each side.

First of all, our maintenance staff is not comprised of the brightest people. They have proven this on many occasions. The dumpsters were already over-flowing last Friday (apparently they did not pickup that day as they usually do), and—intelligent as some of my neighbors are—rather than wait until they were emptied on Tuesday, they just kept piling garbage on top and all around the dumpsters. Seriously. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know it's going to be overfull on a holiday weekend. Which is why I waited until Tuesday.

So, I carry a bunch of stuff out, only to find...sigh. Okay, I'll give the maintenance staff points for picking up all the debris littering the garbage corral after pickup yesterday. However, they lose points for the fact that the only open sections were the front right and rear left. The rear left was shoved way back into the corner so that it was inaccessible—unless you were a squirrel. In the front right side, they had put some long metal poles or frames, making it a bit tricky to toss stuff in and preventing you from opening the back section.

So, I had to set stuff down and then try to toss items in one at a time around the poles. As I was pulling my arm back, I must have been a bit closer to the edge of the big-ass dumpster than I thought or hit something sharp and metal on the side and, um... Well, see for yourself:

Can we say, "OUCH?"

This is what my left forearm looked like late last night. Trust me, it looked a lot uglier when it first happened, and luckily wasn't any deeper and wasn't my dominate hand. Can you imagine if I had hit that edge just a teeny bit harder than I did? Yeah...it would have required a trip to the emergency room and stitches for sure. Shudder.

Thankfully, it had already started to heal several hours later. That is because I am quite a bit smarter than Boss1. Some of you may remember me mentioning (in email or person if not here) that he almost lost his left foot earlier this summer. He was searching for something in the garage when he stepped on a rusted bit of metal that pierced the bottom of his cheap Crocs and, subsequently, the bottom of his foot. Which he promptly ignored and forgot about until it ballooned up a few days later.

I, on the other hand, did not just forget about it. We're talking dumpster. Who knows what may be contaminating it. I immediately washed with soap and hot water, bathed with an antiseptic wipe, and bandaged. And, as you can see by the above photo, it had already started to knit a few hours later when I again cleaned and rebandaged it. You can be sure I'm keeping an eye on it the rest of the week. The last thing I need is a trip to the ER, antibiotics or a hospital stay.

If only Dah Boss had been that smart!