The Perils of Pasta

“Let’s talk about Me!”
—An actor. Any actor.

It will be a rare thing on this blog for me to talk about myself, history being so endlessly fascinating, and my own life being a crashing bore. With the occasional oddball twist. This twist was irresistible to add.

When checking my sources for the Civil War saga above, I grabbed the nearest one, this being the original of The Book of Lists by Irving Wallace, a huge hit two and three decades ago. Everyone had one by the loo. But by the time he got to volume three, you’d have had to keep them in the bog for five years to get through all the material. Consequently, I haven’t read them all.

As I was flipping through it, my eye fell on a list of the Ten Weirdest Reasons People went to the Emergency Room. I got a bit huffy over it. That’s because my trip was Number One.

Okay, they didn’t use my name. As with the story above, they had that much discretion. But it’s no fun sharing a chapter with Ten Eminent Constipation Sufferers.

After all, maybe it was a little weird, but not that weird. Kind of like that great episode of the immortal Dick Van Dyke show, when his wife Laura gets her toe stuck in the faucet, and he asks how in hell she did it, and she replies with exasperation, “I was playing with a drip.”

Well, I was cleaning the stove. Twenty-five years ago, when I hadn’t been married that long, we’d had a party the night before, and I served spaghetti. I was too tired to clean up afterwards. So, by the next morning, the spaghetti had, of course, dried out. And a big piece of it was adhered to the stove top. The stubborn little widget just would not come loose. So, logically, I used my thumbnail to try to lift it.

Unfortunately, I hit it too hard and at just the wrong angle, and the entire strand rammed itself in between my nail and my oh-so-naked flesh, nearly to that mysterious little half-moon at the base. I started screaming like a banshee. It being a Sunday, my Christopher took me to the nearest Medcheck. Bad idea. The “doctor” there, definitely the class anchor from a Philippino barber college, sprayed my thumb with this useless stuff that supposedly freezes your wound to numb it, then began digging for the pasta. I was not frozen. This went on for fifteen agonizing, scream-filled minutes. Even the “doctor” was sweating. Now I know why Americans always talked when the Japs used this method of bamboo torture in the war. You’d talk, too. Unfortunately, I had nothing pertinent to tell the little bastard apart from some colorful suppositions about his family tree.

Finally my Christopher could bear no more, and he yanked me off the table and to the nearest real hospital. For you see, what the barber at the Medcheck failed to realize was that, as the strand of hard spaghetti was imbedded in my warm skin, it was literally cooking, expanding, getting bigger and bigger. And, of course, it was now soft, as well. So, nitwit, it’s not a toothpick. You can’t get hold of the edge with a pair of tweezers and just yank.

The real physicians at the hospital numbed my hand and removed the nail completely. But what struck me most forcefully was the level of interest. In a place that gets everything from gunshot wounds to sickos who masturbated with Comet, they seemed fascinated by my small faux pas. One other doctor, two interns and no less than three nurses stuck their head into my little curtained cubicle to ask, “Are you the spaghetti lady? Can I look?”

Come on, guys, it wasn’t that weird. But that’s what you get for playing with a drip.