I Tear My Foot Open, I Sew Myself Shut

I'm going to do now what I was too tired to do last night. I am going to tell the story of my first full day in Provo.

I woke up, unpacked some things, tried to get the internet set up, got interrupted by a phone call, got interrupted by another phone call, and in the midst of calling my ISP, scheduled with Kristin to go with her and her mom and show them around campus.

Kristin declared she was hungry, so I thought a good place to go would be the Marketplace Cafe in the Tanner building: good food, and I know how to get there. Perfect combo! So we parked and walked in, and as I was opening the second set of doors, I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing and opened the door right over my foot. Wow, talk about hurting. Then I looked down and noticed I was bleeding. Aww man, I thought, I'm hungry, and now I have to find a bathroom in this place so I can clean myself up. A nice young man who was walking by directed Kristin and I to the nearest bathroom, but as I started walking, I noticed that my flip flop was actually filled with blood, and my foot was slipping around in it. "Wow, this is a lot of blood," I said, and I think I said it out loud, but it was a LOT of blood, so I could've been in shock and delirious and imagining who knows what. A girl who was there who later explained her mother was a nurse helped me walk over and sit down at the table, blood spilling out of my shoe with every step. I cannot emphasize enough that it was a LOT of blood, and fairly sickening. The nice young man walked over to a phone and called the BYU EMTs, promised they were coming soon, and departed with the young woman. Then. Well. See, it was the first day of Freshman Orientation, and so at that moment, as I was surrounded by bloody paper towels, tens of thousands (okay, only hundreds) of freshmen came pouring in through the doors. "Watch out for the doors!" I cried. "Welcome to BYU!"

When the BYU EMTs pulled up in their van, I wanted to make light of the situation (there was a LOT of blood), so I joked with Kristin how I wanted them to bring a stretcher. There was mass excitement when they opened up the back of the van, but alas, it was just to grab their bags. They cleaned up my foot a little and took my blood pressure and filled out some forms and encouraged me to wear a sock on it ("Do you know what gangrene is? Shall I describe its effects to you?" the one EMT asked me, the sicko). We even joked that BYU would modify the honor code to disallow the wearing of flip flops -- the Beth Amendment. I'd be a pariah. Then the one EMT looked at the actual slice; the door cut me from in between my third toe and pinkie toe and curved out over the base of my pinkie toe. She'd only seen the arcing, she hadn't looked to find where all the blood (there was a lot) was REALLY coming from. Then the grim news: stitches.

They loaded me onto a wheelchair and took me to BYU Student Health Services. All the while this was going on, of course, hundreds of freshmen were still coming through the doors of the Tanner Building. I was a celebrity. When we got to our destination, I had to fill out lots of forms. I was shaking a lot, but it was mostly from hunger. When I got to the examining room, I met The Nicest nurse's assistant, nurse, and doctor EVER. I'm glad I get to go back today and again in ten so I can talk with them again. They calmed me down (even though I appeared to be very calm and put-together, I WASN'T) after Kristin's wild exclamations of "Your toe is hanging off your foot!!" They x-rayed me. Part of the x-rays even involved taping the rest of my toes back onto the examining table and my injured toe forward so they could get a good picture of it. Ouch.

When they'd determined nothing was broken, they gave me some anesthetic. The doctor asked me if I felt anything sharp. I asked her if she'd done anything. Apparently, the anesthetic was working. She started stitching me up, and I was glad not to feel anything, especially because my understanding of stitches was that it was basically a whipstitch in the skin. I'm so glad it wasn't, because in a few minutes, the anesthetic had worn off, and she still had three stitches to go. Three stitches in betweeh my toes, where I was the most injured. Three stitches boring through where it had been scraped raw and bloody. I didn't say anything, because I didn't want to be rude and ask for more anesthetic. So I took it, and thanked them, and the nurse bandaged me up and gave me a Very Cool blue bootie thing and sent me away.

Kristin's laughter at the sight of my blue bootie made the entire ordeal worth it.

And also later that night when I got to ride an electric scooter all over Wal-Mart while shopping for food. Priceless.