By: Selina Pedi-Smith, Pellere Foundation
Tempered glass is fascinating stuff. It doesn’t break into dangerous-looking shards. It turns into thousands of tiny pieces that look almost harmless.
They are, however, decidedly not.
Quick recap: Don was moving piles of dirt; a modestly sized rock bounced from the bucket and hit the glass door; the door shattered, pelting Don’s legs with hundreds of tiny projectiles.
There was blood.
Quite a lot of it.
The next half hour consisted of Kai dashing inside to tell me Papa needed me NOW, me dashing across the yard with our large first-aid kit in hand, and then a lot of gauze, rags, towels, pressure, more gauze, bandages, more pressure, more bandages, getting him inside and cleaned up enough to figure out if there was only one cut vein or two, and me asking every couple of minutes, “You still feeling okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“You getting dizzy?”
“No.”
“Promise you’ll tell me if that changes?”
“I promise.”
Eventually the one nicked vein stopped arguing and let us fully stem the bleeding, and the kids and I were able to clean up a bit while Don had a little lie-down. Archer tended to the many other, smaller cuts all over Don’s legs while I cleaned the blood off his hands and Kai scrubbed blood from the grout in the kitchen.
I’m very glad no one decided to randomly visit right then. Our house looked rather like a murder scene for a hot minute.
And that was my Thursday evening.
Until about 5pm, I had been preoccupied with entirely different thoughts and tasks.
I had answered emails, written more emails, made phone calls, handled paperwork, gone to an appointment, bought groceries and mentally rearranged the rest of the day several times. I was trying to keep a household moving, keep several projects moving and keep myself moving somewhere in the middle of it all.
At no point did I imagine I would soon be applying pressure to skin slicked with blood streaming from my husband’s shin like a tiny firehose.
That was not on my schedule.
Neither, for that matter, was this article.
I sat down at the computer not two minutes before Kai came running into the room. I was planning to finish an entirely different column, one I had already started and had been turning over in my head for two days.
That article remains unfinished.
The groceries eventually made it off the kitchen counter. Most of the blood came out of the towels. The skid loader is sitting outside without a door. Don is recovering nicely with a heavily bandaged leg and a gentle suggestion to avoid any more disagreements with sharp rocks.
And I am back at the computer, considerably later than planned, writing about tempered glass.
It really is fascinating stuff.
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