TEN Fickle Fingers, in this case. Ugh ugh ugh.

Tonight, the least of our worries was the chopping of the broccoli:

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Barely half an hour after Eleanor and I got home from work, she working diligently on getting a yummy dinner ready, the broccoli struck back.  A freshly-microwaved dish of it, accidentally poured onto both of her hands. As in 100°C (212°F for us Luddites). As in a lot of it.

I was in here, and screams came from both her and Em pretty quickly. First attempts with ice did nothing to stop the pain from going to eleven on the ol' Triage Ten scale, so I backed out the car and asked, where to, ER or Doc-in-a-Box? She chose the latter, which is closer.

Moments later, they were administering the first pain injection and dressing the worst of the hands. (Both caught it pretty bad.) Neither was doing all that much, and we were referred to the Big Ugly Public Hospital in the center of the city, which happens to have the only burn unit for at least 100 miles.

They were, to put it mildly, stellar. Every single one of them, from the triage nurse to the about even dozen of residents, med students and (not that many) higher-ups, who treated the pain, undressed and redressed the blisters, and were above all just DECENT to her for our roughly two-hour stay there.

She's now sleeping, the third pain shot enough to turn the trick and a bushelbasket of Lortabs in reserve for if things get worse painwise.  She gets rechecked on Monday, mostly as a precaution against "evolution" of the wounds to lower levels of skin than they appear to have affected.

Of the many of you, the only residents I can remember by name are Melanie (who did most of the hand-iwork), Andrea (first MD in the ED and the one who wrote the ultimate Lortab scrip) and David (the head resident who put the official good prognosis on how things looked). All of the rest of you, though, were equally helpful, and kind, and everything television tells us a big city emergency room is not supposed to be.

Needless to say, the grrl will be off work for a bit. Ironically enough, she can now come with when Em and I light the last Advent candle a week from Sunday. There will be more pain, and awkward moments, and a lot less excellent home cooking. Since we are allegedly insured for all of this, the financial pain shouldn't be too bad, though. And most importantly, we're okay, and together through it.

I will post some words at plantmom for her, although most of her readers are mine as well. And yes, that big hole at the bottom of this page is me logging your pageviews- mainly so I know who I have to get back to and tell about this sometime tomorrow when we're both more awake and she's, I'm praying, much more on the mend.