A finger, an absent mind, and a long history met on the sharp blade of a blender. If you know what an immersion blender is you might think me a little less stupid. And, as I said, I can’t blame my mind as it wasn’t involved in the incident. It was the pure non-thinking mind, the kind I try to reach in meditation, that managed to take over in what seemed at the time to be a very inopportune moment. It was a mind devoid of thought that had me stick my finger in to the small area around the blade to push out the black beans that had gathered there, just having finished pureeing a huge pot of soup. Blood was gushing from my finger as I dropped the blender having pressed the on button inadvertently while my digit was still cleaning out the beans. I could see the nail was sliced in half and there was a gash below the edge of the cuticle, but with all the blood I couldn’t tell if my finger was still intact.
It’s funny what happens in my brain when my body is in trouble. I appeared calm on the outside. Beyond a spastic yelp when it first happened, I was silent as I made my way to the sink, turned it on and ran water over my torn up fingertip. Wild thoughts were running fast through my mind: “Oh God, I have chopped off the end of my finger! I’m going to have emergency surgery!” But as I stared at the mass of bleeding flesh under the faucet, I realized it was just a deep cut. The question of whether it would warrant stitches remained, but that determination could wait. I was leaning on the edge of the sink with all my weight on my forearms, which felt like they were glued to the sleek black countertop. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I eventually stopped rinsing and pinched my finger back together with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand. I held it hard to stop the bleeding. Good thinking.
“Does it hurt?” Grace wanted to know. She was standing beside me having witnessed the event, and her question brought my focus to her and my nerve endings, both for the first time. The shock was making my brain operate like an internet connection that is weak and slow. My awareness finally landed on the fact that she was frightened. Her eyes were full of tears and she was gripping my other arm hard with both hands. I was barely keeping it together so I had no resources to calm her down, other than staying so myself. The cogs turned back to the tip of my left index finger. Quickly and evenly as an ocean wave, the pain rolled in. I realized yes, it was hurting more every second. “No it doesn’t really hurt,” came out in response.
It’s completely automatic for mothers to lie in order to reassure a child and it made perfect sense to me, in that moment, to do so. I added calmly, slowly, “Grace, can you please get Yoly?” She ran at lightening speed to the next room where Yoly, our babysitter, was reading to Frances, yelling: “Mom cut herself and it’s bleeding really bad! Come quick!” Yoly appeared at my side with her composure in tact and I asked her to get me some gauze to wrap around the cut. While I waited I started to feel dizzy. I realized my legs were getting too weak to support the rest of me and I started for the couch, unsure if I would reach it before collapsing.
By the time I got to it, I felt a thick fuzz coming over my whole sensory system. The room was closing in, I heard only the sound of my heart, I felt nausea and tingling and a wave of heat that made my hair wet around the edge of my scalp. I closed my eyes to relieve the dizziness and with hindsight I know I felt the way one feels just before a faint, but in that moment all I felt was sheer panic: “I am not going to make it! This is really, really bad! How could this happen?” Yet hovering above and overriding the chaotic thoughts was a sense of deep peace. It was a wordless feeling of serenity that had me sit there, still and with eyes closed, knowing I would be all right. That there was nothing to do but wait.
It was beginning to dawn on me that I had been here before. About fifteen years ago while watching a particularly gruesome scene in an episode of X-Files where evil aliens were cutting in to someone’s body to harvest organs, I started feeling the same waves of dizziness and black out. I had rushed out of my house and into the backyard to get fresh air. It took about thirty minutes before I felt normal again.
That was my first and worst panic attack, but it was not the last. For about a year I had them, all brought on by images of skin opening up. It didn’t have to be mine, it could be any picture of a cut. Eventually, and with a little help from a therapist, I worked it back to an incident when I was ten. My mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and I watched her get upset when her incision opened up a week after her mastectomy. I have recently been writing about this event and not ten minutes before cutting my finger, I was reading my mother’s own account of the very same incident, which did not include my memory of watching her. In her version, I wasn’t there.
Back on the couch, I am beginning to recover and Grace is sitting next to me getting hysterical. Since the moment I dropped the blender, she has been expressing my panic perfectly so that I don’t have to. Frances is there too but she has taken on the role of nursemaid. She is holding out a Band-aid. She has taken off the wrapping and the little white tabs and is ready to put it on the finger which I have still not looked at since the bleeding stopped. I am starting to feel better. The layers are gluing back together. But I don’t want to take any chances looking at it, so I ask Yoly to examine it. My nail had apparently protected my flesh from being cut at the top part of the finger and then the blade had come around again making only a single gash which was pretty deep but short in length. No stitches, we decided. I was lucky.
It was a perfect little storm of emotional and physical pain, designed to pull me forward, or back, or both. The way everything lined up to remind me that that moment when I was ten years old is still with me. Some pretty strong strings are still tied back to that scene. My mother sitting on the edge of her bed looking at her wound, the stitches recently removed and now opening up. Her fear. Her panic. I felt them, but I absorbed the feelings as hers, not mine. Just like Grace expressed the panic I was working hard to contain. I wonder what Grace will remember. I only remember feeling numb.
When I was thirty five, I had a lump removed from my left breast, the same side my mother's breast was removed from. Immediately after my minor surgery, I collapsed outside the OR, suddenly feeling the enormous toll of watching her sit there, terrified of what was happening. In a hospital waiting room in Westwood California, twenty five years later, I finally felt it.
Now here, with a band-aid (thank you Frances) on my finger and the recognition that this was no “accident”, I will paraphrase something I recently heard Patti Smith say in a radio interview: That time does not heal all wounds. You just get to know them better. And eventually, they become your friends.
