I had a little time before a family function on a recent weekend, so I decided to spend some of it reorganizing a bit of the stuff in my garage. I was making good headway … until I reached up to move a kayak and scraped my arm on something just out of sight.
In my garage, this isn’t an unusual event, so I reflexively checked my arm to make sure I hadn’t broken the skin or been impaled by a big splinter. To my surprise, upon inspecting the site, I found a neat and arrow-straight 2-inch incision that provided me with a new, unobstructed view of the muscle in the underside of my forearm.
I had caught my arm on the corner of a big piece of sheet metal. Fortunately, it was very sharp and had no signs of rust. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be able to fix this with a napkin and duct tape, so I covered it with a paper towel and headed into the house to ask my wife to bring me to the urgent care facility a few miles away.
By the time I tracked her down, the cut had started to bleed—albeit slowly, thanks to my immediate and constant pressure, which also kept the two sides of the chasm together. My wife dutifully stuck a couple Band- Aids across the slice, and we headed to the driveway.
As we settled into her SUV, a new set of thoughts started running through my mind: How do I buckle the seatbelt and keep the pressure applied? I hadn’t thought about this before, but it didn’t take long to figure out that a short release of my arm wasn’t going to be fatal, so that puzzle was quickly solved.