I DON'T DO BLOOD!

I DON'T DO BLOOD! Plain and simple! The sight of blood makes me pass out. It always has. And it's gotten worse as I've gotten older.


I could tell you many a story......... about how my daughter Brooke got a terrible bloody nose and I had to retreat myself to the living room and put my head between my legs and take deep breaths.


.....or how my son, Brad, cut his leg open while climbing on a dock while swimming with his cousin, Kevin, and Kevin was the one that had to help Brad up about 120 stairs while I followed behind, white as a ghost, ready to throw up.


......or maybe when I was driving to work one morning and managed to shut my own fingers in the drivers side window WHILE driving down the road, I had to pull over in some random parking lot, get out of my car, get down on my hands and knees to control my breathing so that I wouldn't lose consciousness.


.......oh yes, and the wonderful story about how I passed out in the high school bleachers at one of Brooke's basketball games when one of her team mates, Courtney King, fell during a game and broke her nose.

Well, get ready, because it gets better............... last night was the big daddy of them all.

Let me just start by saying that I am far from a hypochondriac, I'm pretty good at handling pain, and I would never call on anyone to help me with a situation unless I thought it was totally necessary. I am also not a huge fan of hospitals and doctors offices. (There's way too many sick people in these places.) I'm a person who would never go to the doctor unless absolutely necessary. And I'm a mother who would never take their child to the doctor for a runny nose and cough or fever or anything like that if I felt is wasn't serious.

So with that said, here's my story:

Last night, I basically dropped a wine glass on my wrist and sliced my wrist wide open. It immediately started gushing blood. Unfortunately, I was the only one home at the time and I couldn't get the bleeding to stop and in a nutshell, I pretty much freaked out! There was blood ALL over, and I started getting weak and light headed. I began feeling the need to vomit and I started getting dizzy. Then my arms started tingling and I started losing the feeling in my hands.

Everything would have been just fine if the stupid slash across my wrist would have just stopped bleeding for crying out loud. Even as I applied pressure to the little wound on my wrist, the blood wouldn't stop pouring out! So then, you know me.......I'm thinking that I'm going to pass out and bleed to death. I had no idea if I had cut a major artery or something and from the amount of blood streaming from my right wrist, it was hard for me to think otherwise.

I thought about calling a friend to come over and help me....yes, I would call Heather and she would calm me down, get the bleeding to stop, clean up my wound, wrap it up with a clean towel and then she could drive me to the hospital for stitches. And I even TRIED to call her, but my fingers weren't cooperating, I couldn't remember her phone numbers and I kept dropping the phone. And what good was Heather going to do, if I indeed had cut a major artery and she couldn't get the bleeding to stop anyway? It would be more time wasted waiting for her to drive the 10 minutes to my house, only to have to either call someone else or take me to the hospital which would be another 10 minutes of me losing more of my precious blood! So after several attempts to dial Heathers stupid phone number and with one last look under my blood soaked towel to see the blood STILL oozing from my wound with no indication of an end in sight, I did what I thought was the only smart thing to do.....I dialed 911.

So here I am, lying on my dining room floor, face up with my legs up resting on a chair, covered in blood, trying to hang on to the phone, apply pressure to the cut, talk to the nice 911 operator, hyperventilating and moaning, all at the same time. And hoping my daughter doesn't walk in and see me on the floor in a pool of blood before the ambulance gets to my house.

Oh, and I almost forgot, while all of this is going on, my little dog Max is by my side, licking up the blood from the floor and making nice little bright red paw prints all over my house.

Well, with all that said and done, the ambulance ended up arriving in no time at all. The nice ambulance people settled me down, and took me to the hospital where I got a big "3" stitches in my wrist which I am hoping will leave a nice big scar to remind me of what an idiot I am.

Yes............. after countless apologizing to both the ambulance technicians and the hospital staff , who by the way treated me wonderfully and did their best to convince me that I HAD did the right thing by calling 911. The doctor said I had not hit a major artery, but simply cut a smaller artery and he did assure me that the bleeding would have stopped eventually. And although I did lose a lot of blood, I didn't come close to losing a dangerous amount, Thank God!

And that's it, that's the end of my story................after getting a tetanus shot and sending me home, here I am. I can laugh about it now, but looking back, I was honestly scared!

I have never been so scared in my entire life and I truly thought I was going to die.....to bleed to death on my dining room floor. I'm so thankful that my little wound wasn't as serious as I had thought it was, or that it could have been.

Last night was the first time I have ever been in an ambulance, and lets just hope I don't have to be in one ever again!