self-inflicted, work-related

Sunday morning, another week begins -- this one just a little more miserable than most as a result of the hour of our lives/sleep lost to the spring forward of daylight savings time.

Ironically, just as summer time began, winter returned with a vengeance. On Friday morning I was working on my tan in an old but still serviceable bikini that will never see a locale outside of my apartment's balcony; it was so hot I couldn't take more than 20 minutes on each side before I gave up to go splash cold water on my sweating face. By Saturday night, the apartment had gotten colder than it's been in two months, and the bed took forever to get comfortable. All night, it thundered and lightninged and poured down and was still gloomy and raining this morning. Traffic was snarled worse than ever due to traffic lights being knocked out by the storm.

I tossed and turned dreaming nonstop about documentation management and the main product manager I need to deal with. Despite the rain, we are not talking about a wet dream here. I must have been troubled.

When the clock radio blared at 7, I just turned over and went back to sleep for a while. I was still exhausted. I'm usually the first one up, drag myself to pee and then make coffee, shouting to ms. squarepeg on the way to start moving. Mr. squarepeg will get out of bed when he has to, at a moment's notice. He doesn't drag in the morning like we do. Around 7:35 I finally got up and shouted to the young ms to get cracking. I went to the kitchen to throw her lunch together, and she emerged for her banana soon after. That's all she eats in the morning, these days; I give her anything else (like oatmeal or cheerios & milk), she says she feels sick.

Mr. S agreed to give her a ride to school today, because of the pelting rain (which had pretty much stopped by the time they left, as it turned out), and that's how I heard about the terrible traffic jams all over town. What should have been a 10-minute drive turned into half an hour to take her just halfway, and then he let her walk the rest. So she missed most of her first class.

I took my time getting ready for work, knowing I could beat the jams by leaving late as usual. But even though I didn't get on the road till 10 am, it was still snarled, and the trip took twice as long as usual, nearly 50 minutes today.

I was in a pretty foul mood, I must admit. I was dragging my ass to work and not happy about it, typically bummed out for a Sunday morning. I had to drive around the parking garage more than usual to find a spot, and finally squeezed in beside some ass whose car was leaning way too heavily into the free spot to his/her right. That always irritates me too. It left me minimal space to open my door, and as I got out I banged my head, with my sunglasses perched on top, into the door frame, causing the glasses to clatter to the floor of the lot. That felt idiotic. But the best was yet to come.

Sighing in mental preparation for the office, I grabbed my purse and my tote bag -- how men manage with pockets alone never fails to amaze me -- and stepped out of the car into the narrow space between the cars, and quickly slammed the door behind me.

Unfortunately, that's when my day went really bad because somehow my right index finger was slammed in the door too. Horrified, I dropped everything on the filthy floor and opened the door to release my finger. I don't know if you've ever experienced such a painful event, but my life flashed before me in that instant. Well, perhaps not exactly my life, but certainly the life and questionable future of my finger flashed before my eyes in those moments.

I urged myself not to panic and held the finger very tightly, squeezing it with my other hand to prevent the rush of blood to the finger that my body would naturally be attempting. This is what I always do to avoid a bruise if I get a knock or bang on some part of my body. Immediate pressure on the injured spot for a minute or two -- just until it stops hurting -- always has the desired effect, at least in minor incidents. This one was not minor though.

I opened the back door of the car so I could sit down while holding my finger, and sat this way for about five minutes. The pain grew, and my uninjured hand was shaking uncontrollably. I was afraid to look at the finger, afraid to see the damage, but after five minutes I looked quickly. No blood or gore; that was good. Not on the outside, anyway. My nail had already turned black, as I suppose the damage to the nail bed meant the blood was there whether I pressed on it or not.

I dragged myself up to the office wondering how I'd deal with this. The pain was huge and the finger was throbbing and I didn't really know if I should be taking myself to Emergency yet. I held it together in the elevator going up with someone I'm barely acquainted with, and once in the office went straight to my favorite colleague (50something modern religious guy, British-born) and said, "I need your help; I just smashed my finger in my car door." He immediately said, "We should get ice," and we went together to our little kitchen, in the freezer of which I've never found ice. Fortunately, he found two lone cubes, enough to put into a glass of water for me, so I could soak the finger. Too bad it completely killed to do so, but now and again I did it, in between radiating to the finger with my other hand.

Radiating is what I've learned to do to injuries of any kind; it's simply focussing the natural electromagnetic energy that any living person has coursing through him/her, by holding the fingertips of one hand together and pointing it at the injury. This works most noticeably with minor burns, by the way. If you touch a hot pan, for example, it would probably produce a first- or second-degree burn. However, by plunging the burn in cold water to immediately slow the burning process, and then radiating to the burn with your fingertips (you can do this to yourself, too) until the burn intensifies too much to continue, then back in the cold water, then radiate some more, and keep repeating this for about ten minutes, the burn disappears completely.

Any way, I sat at my desk basically doing this -- radiating and dunking in cold water -- while I read email. I called mr. squarepeg to moan a little and he offered to bring me the homeopathic ointment we like to use in such cases, Traumeel. That was really very sweet of him, and his caring did cheer me. Soon after that I went to lunch, then decided the pain would make it impossible to concentrate on anything, let alone type. It was a very slow day, thank god, with nothing urgent demanding my attention -- could have been a perfect day for making a dent in the soon-to-be-urgent projects -- and my boss was on the phone with her girlfriends all day, so there was no point in playing the martyr, the way I did in February with one of the worst migraines of my life on the day before an annual conference was convening. I went home at 3, finger throbbing all the way, but at least it was speedy; not a lot of commuters on the highway at that hour.

I've been mostly lying down since I got home. Sometimes it just feels like the nail area is in agony, but sometimes the pain feels like it's spreading up the finger into my whole hand and my arm too. I took some paracetamol (tylenol) when I started typing this, and it's less painful now. I am not using my index finger (pointer) to type, of course.

So I arranged myself something of a day off today, didn't I? Not exactly a gunshot wound to the foot, or an overdose of pills, but it served its sick purpose, I suppose.

Some people get back problems; others lose their voice or get the flu. Slamming your own finger in a car door somehow seems like a more obvious cry for help.