Blood And Earwax

It’s been like an episode of ER in my house over the weekend. The live one directed by Quentin Tarantino.

The wife and I have been vying to win a competition of ailments and injuries.

Call it cowardice, call it lack of motivation, call it perhaps just a healthy dollop of sanity but I put on a very poor show. I hardly made an effort.

I kicked off with a sore toe at the end of the last week. Is it a corn? Is it a nascent verruca? Is it a Manitou growing on the side of my little toe? One that will eventually start talking to me in a the lost dialect of the Mohicans, asking me plaintively what the hell ever happened to Madeleine Stowe ‘cos she was a proper fox, she was?

The wife suspected it was just a sore patch where my feet had been rubbing together. Not even worth a Band-aid.

Next I went for an infected ear. I’ve been suffering loss of hearing and irritation in my inner ear. Have been for months. Eventually I went to see the doctor. He couldn’t see any infection. Mainly because he couldn’t see my eardrum. It was occluded by a large mass of compacted earwax. In fact both my ears were 90% stoppered by plugs of my own making. I imagined two big balls of wax each the size of a Granny Smith but then couldn’t help wondering – if wax balls that big were inside my head where the heck would my brain be?

What? I didn’t quite catch that?

Anyway, I thought I might be in for a good syringing but no. The cure these days is a week long course of olive oil ear drops followed by a week long course of bicarbonate of soda ear drops. The first to soften; the second to [and I quote my doctor here] “fizz and disperse”.

I know, I know. I let Tarantino down. And I was hoping to get Brad Pitt to play me and everything.

My wife, Karen, however, decided to go for something not only spectacular but also improbable.

Picture the scene. She’s in her jimjams / sweats / slacks / comforters / whatever you want to call them. A casual trouser and top combo by any other name. She’s heading upstairs. Suddenly there is an ear piercing shriek (well, it would have been if my ears hadn’t been gunked up with wax). I dash out to the hallway, hastily abandoning my book, the TV remote, my box of chocolates and my crème de menthe and find my wife mimicking the one-footed kung fu pose from the original Karate Kid film.

The big toe on the foot that is raised is bloodied. Bloodied in fact in a thin line that seems to extend completely around the toe a few millimetres from where it extends from the base of the foot.

My first thought is that she’s broken the toe. Stubbed it against something so hard that it’s snapped violently and ruptured the skin all the way around.

But no. She hasn’t stubbed her toe.

What happened was, whilst walking barefoot in her slacks, she managed to catch the toe in the hem of the bottom of the trousers.

I turn slightly green, imagining a loop of loose thread that has acted like a cheese wire around my wife’s big toe. Karen fears the same and tells me later her biggest fear was that the skin was cut so deeply all the way round that the flesh would have simply fallen off like a discarded sheath, exposing the perfectly clean bones of her toe beneath.

I’m not even sure if that’s possible.

As it is, once I start cleaning up the would I see that actually she’d only cut the flesh on the top of the toe. Quite deeply but not enough to need stitches.

Phew.

I have a few minutes when I think that maybe I’m about to trump her endeavours with a mini heart attack but actually once I’ve calmed down I’m fine. Panic over. Don’t worry about me, folks.

However, Tarantino and my wife are now like this.

His next film is gonna feature a toe-job, I’m telling you.

And my wife wishes me to tell you that, just from experience, it’s not a nice way to go.