Last week, I was cutting peppers in preparation for dinner on a Sunday night. It being Sunday night, and me being a pastor, I was a little bit on the ragged side. I was using one of our new knives, a set of Wusthofs that are really very much sharper than the cheap microserrated set Rache and I bought right after we got married.
There was a moment of distraction, and I stopped paying attention to what I was doing.
When the knife entered my thumb, I knew it had gone deep, and the stream of singularly unpastorly words that came from my mouth was as colorful as the deep red blood that poured from the wound in the pad of my thumb.
For the next 25 minutes, I tried to staunch the bleeding with pressure and an elevated hand, while at the same time looking up whether or not this meant 1) it was fine to deal with at home or 2) it was time for a five hour multi-thousand dollar trip to the emergency room.
The five hours is annoying enough, as one sits in a room full of folks and tries not to get too much blood on everything or pick up a new airborne disease. But the money? The money's what turns it into a particular and familiar calculus.
Because every time I go to the ER, it's thousands of dollars. Not that I'd have needed an ambulance or anything, as it was my thumb, not my neck. But even a couple of stitches would mean hours of waiting, and then a string of bills from the hospital and from subsidiary practices and doctors. I'd pay, separately, for nurses and anesthesiology, for meds and supplies.
I have insurance, thanks to my denomination, the price of which has gone up 45% in the last five years. The deductible ain't low, and even then, there's invariably some service that is either denied or "out of network" that you have to spend the next five months haggling over. Or, as with some recent bills, the insurer just never seems to quite get around to processing the reimbursements.
I couldn't tell quite how long or deep the cut was, as it bled every time I tried to take a look. At somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 inch long, it looked ballpark self-healing, so I decided to just let it be. After about twenty five minutes, the bleeding subsided, and was no longer soaking through the bandages...so long as they were tightly wound. I went to bed, and hoped I'd not bleed on the sheets.
The next morning, when I opened up the bandages, the brief look I took before the blood started flowing again told me that yes, it was going to scar. The wound had opened a bit. My thumb was going to have a divot in it in perpetuity. Should I have gotten it stitched? Probably.
But it wasn't infected, and it looked manageable. With care and attention, with proper wound-site care and intermittent application of antibiotic salve? It'd just be a scar. Function would be retained. And I'm a pastor, not a hand-model.
As a contestant in the game of "Scar or ER" that our healthcare "system" has us playing, I was comfortable with my choice of door number one. "It's...a brand new scar!" I can hear Bob Barker's voice intoning, as the studio audience cheers.
At a bare minimum, that scar'll remind me of two things. First, to be more careful with our new knives. And second, that there's got to be a better way to provide medical care in America.
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