81
Threading
Lori Eisner
There I was at the emergency room in Cumberland, nearly fifty miles from home, because of this gash, not really a gash, more like an uneven slice, in my right leg just above my knee ˗ thank God it didn’t hit the knee ˗ to the middle of my thigh. The nurse practitioner said, “Goodness, at least you missed the major artery!” It seemed like I had hit the artery for all the blood that soaked my chinos and the T-shirt that my brother, Buddy, gave me. I used it to apply pressure on the wound along with the sack of ice from Danny’s. The other men who were there at this little catastrophe ˗ excuse me, major catastrophe ˗ knew exactly what to do, and they were the ones who determined that we didn’t need an ambulance, that going with Buddy was just fine, and that I didn’t require any preliminary medical treatment other than significant pressure and ice on the wound. All good news.
So, because of a moderate amount of hysteria that I exhibited (and which Buddy said was out of control during the long drive), the physician’s assistant gave me Demerol and went to find out whether I needed double layer surgical inverting sutures, which sounded pretty terrible to me, or if regular stitches would do.
When the perpetrating event first happened, it was raining like a deity was very aggravated with our town. I was looking around to see if there was some Noah reincarnate building an ark or something, because it seemed like we really needed one. The buildings, the fields, the streets – everything got a pounding, and the earth could not open itself fast enough to sop up all that water since we had had pretty regular rainfall for the last month. But this was no regular rain. This was a mid-day, dark, thunderous rain, a rain that had even the birds sought from cover and the motorists had to drive along the main street from memory since the split-second views afforded by windshield wipers provided little help. Steam rose from the street, obscuring everything but maybe a color here or there and the blinking neon lights of