Seth's new body ornamentation

[Sethomas]

So, I went hardcore grocery shopping for the first time in a long while last week with the goal in mind of keeping off the roughly eighty pounds I've lost in the past fifteen or so months, most of which was lost since this January. I went to that citadel of value and nutrition, ALDI, to get the most bang for my ever-scant buck. I saw a package of attractive knives with fluted blades and stainless steel grips--three for $10! I figured I should get them, you know, so I'd feel more like a cook and thus be less tempted to splurge on fast food so often.

I got them home along with lots of meat and grains and other accoutrements. They were in that obnoxious packaging that you commonly see housing electrical components like USB cords or generic computer mice or whatever. I had a conversation with my cousin about two days prior about how those are actually responsible for a huge number of emergency room visits, so I bore that in mind as I eviscerated the packaging. Ever careful, I succeeded in removing all three knives from their plastic abode. I then noticed, however, that there was quite unnecessarily a cable tie wrapped around the largest member of the set where the tang meets the grip with just enough room for it to be severed.

Now, scissors are always hard to find in my home. I thought that I would test the actual worth of the knives by employing them in the task of removing the cable tie. Knowing that sharp edges and a great amount of force would be used in precarious unison, I invested very great care to cut the tie in a safe direction.

Applying a meek amount of force, I could tell that the cable tie would not easily yield. After two seconds I decided that I should give up and find the scissors, so I relaxed my effort on the knives and lowered their posture.

Somehow, in the act of applying LESS force, the plastic tie yielded in perfect coalescence with a differential of movement. I felt a numb impact on my right pointer finger, watching it grace slightly with teh length of the blade. As far as sensory perception went, it seemed like I had just stubbed my knuckle as if against the edge of a rounded table. I was cognizant, however, that this was probably just shock and that my nerve endings were trying to shield me from a bleaker truth.

I set my hand at my side, refusing to look at it until I could gather an effective plan for wrapping a cut since my bandage collection was rather inadequate. I didn't have time to finish a course of action in my head before i just heard a series of rapid-fire drips of fluid hitting the floor.

I wanted to be incredulous, but the reality that hit me was that I was quickly bleeding. A lot. I looked at my hand and couldn't discern any actual tear in flesh; the font of blood was too quick for any assessment to be made. I rushed to the bathroom sink and rinsed my finger in cold water just to assess the damage, but no. The water came from the faucet clear and hit the basin of the sink crimson. So, I just wrapped it in lots and lots of toilet paper and elevated it, yadda yadda yadda.

After a few minutes of giving my wound time to collect itself, I kindly asked my roomie to cut off a few inches of culinary cheese cloth and a few lengths of masking tape. I really wanted that solution to work for as long as I could make it to the pharmacy to sterilize it and let it heal by itself. However, I didn't like the idea of driving with one hand so I called my aunt to come and evaluate it.

She laughed at the idea that I thought I could get out of this without stitches.

After about four hours, I left the emergency room with nine of them.

They used, for some reason, black sutures. This causes my finger to look necrotic and gangrenous no matter how clean it actually is. I asked my sister about this and she insisted that she's always used bright blue sutures, especially with the numerous stab wounds she had to mend as an emergency room doctor in England.

I keep trying to take pictures of my finger in a manner befitting the beauty of the stitches, but neither my nice digital camera nor my webcam seem up to task. So, these are the best I can do.

http://www.coeternalism.com/seth/finger/finger1.jpg
http://www.coeternalism.com/seth/finger/finger2.jpg
http://www.coeternalism.com/seth/finger/finger3.jpg
http://www.coeternalism.com/seth/finger/finger4.jpg

Yeah, my wild life.

[darkvare]

at least you kept your finger

[Ninjavenom]

man, it's such a pleasure to read your posts. It's like they're on a whole other internet compared to the garbage that litters this place sometimes.

[terrva]

Hey, at least it wasn't your penis. Reminds me of the time i nearly slashed my thumb in half with a boxcutter.

[Pub Lover]

Post more often, Seth. >:

:(

[Kitsa]

I'm glad the damage was fairly contained!

Back in what we'll call my "previous life", when I was working in the ER, I was doing a Christmas Day shift when a guy came in, drenched with blood. He'd been given a new knife for Christmas. He used his old knife to try and cut through the obnoxious packaging. He cut himself three times....once on the old knife, when it slipped, once on the sharp edge of the cut packaging, when his hand ran into it, and once more when the new knife inside popped open. He was pretty torn-up.

That blister-packaging is evil and I hate it. Unexpected zip ties are bad too.

[Tadao]

Secret Santa revenge plot added.

[BurntToShreds]

You should post it on the completely forgotten Scarmageddon.

[Dr. Octogonopus]

A couple years back I cut most of the end of my finger off with the electric hedgetrimmers, and the weirdest part when you do something like that is how it felt just like going through a branch, but there was pressure on my finger, and blood spurted out in my pulse. It was pretty freaky.

[McClain]

I used to cut Seth all the time just to get him to tell stories.

[Dixie]

Jeeze Seth! You got yourself really good there! :(

[Colonel Flagg]

DV is right, you could have lost your finger. Count yourself lucky.

[executioneer]

first you cut your hair, then you cut your finger, what's next your w*ener

[Chojin]

seth, these attempts on your life are just getting lazy.

[McClain]

seth, these attempts on your life are just getting lazy.

lol

[Fat_Hippo]

Looks like you got lucky...or unlucky really, but you know what I mean. But at least you got an entertaining story out of it.

[Protoclown]

BATTLE SCARS

[Nick]

I just loved how you built up all that tension, and you still kept your finger tip. WHAT A LET DOWN.







ps: Seriously, glad you're okay. :3

[BurntToShreds]

Damn, Doc, did you get the end reattached? And why are you acting like it was just a scratch?

[Dr. Octogonopus]

Well, it was damned freaky at the time, but later it was just a pain, no pun intended. I got it sewed up, and it was cool. But it wouldn't be the first dumb thing I've done, lots of which were way worse. It's the price you pay for being a dumbass teenager.

[Pub Lover]

Seth, I had a question about your car.

[Sethomas]

Yeah, but I didn't feel like answering it at the time. You asked what kind it is, right?

My new car is a 2000 Chrysler Sebring JXI Limited. We still don't know how to describe the color. It was listed as "brown", which I'm confident prevented the auction from going up several hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars more, but it's actually a nice tone of copper-ish.

Chrysler is the same as every other nominally American car company in most regards other than financial success, but in recent years it's taken to the marketing strategy of pretending like it's European in style. Their biggest success seems to be the 300, which was designed on the assumption that Americans are dumb enough to regularly mistake them for Bentleys. As a result, I would imagine that people stopped buying Bentleys here for the shame in having them mistaken for Chryslers.

The Sebring model is Chrysler's reaction to the Ford Taurus, which is to say a horrifically bland car that actualizes a typical mid-lifer's realization that he cannot afford a sufficiently vain crisis.

The JXI indicate by some arcane logic that the car is not only a convertible, but the "I" tells that it is a "sports" model of convertible. This is evidenced by the leather seats.

The final "Limited" addendum tells that it's even sportier than the standard Sebring JX and even the elite JXI. I guess that explains the hilarious alloy wheels and the sound system that will likely see to a sharp reduction in the range of pitch and volume in my hearing. Also, the "Limited" addendum indicates that the gear shift includes an extra function that allows you to pretend like it's a manual transmission.

It's funny that I ended up with this car, because in terms of my finances, pragmatic ability to pick it up, and basic wants it was the best choice. Yet, it also included a huge number of bonuses beyond these that include the kind of thing that I typically make fun of people for electing--a ridiculously powerful sound system and deluxe wheels that are in themselves probably worth (to people who give more of a shit than I) almost what I paid for the whole car. As a result, I'm mainly pleased with myself for having made a good investment in that I could probably hold onto it for two years, add thousands of miles to the odometer, and still sell it locally at a very nice profit. As it stands, the fact that I neurotically investigated the market for weeks before buying a car 800 miles away let me get it for just over half of its market value. Maybe when the weather is nicer you can expect a photo of car and driver in full sexiness.

[Pub Lover]

Watch out for more bean fields is all.

[Sethomas]

See, among the hilarious facets of that episode my favorite right now is that I spent a great deal of effort trying to flip the car right-side-up before standing back and imagining that I couldn't take a properly-grounded car and flip it upside-down. Extrapolating that I was wasting my effort, I felt that I'd made an epiphany of physics up there with the Schrödinger Equation.

In close second is the moment when I found a cute girl's phone number in my pocket, having forgotten about her by that time, and feeling an extreme sense of accomplishment right before I had medical scans performed looking for internal bleeding as everyone in the hospital expected me to drop dead any second.

And then there's the detail that my brain conveniently deleted the part of my memory telling how I actually got OUT of the car from being pinned inside upside-down, since the windshield was intact and there was no space whatsoever for me to have crawled out the window. And, even if I had done that one would expect my entire outfit to have been covered in mud while in fact I only had a light grass stain at my knees.

Another hilarious part? With the extreme malaise I had upon landing in total darkness, I came to the conclusion that I was dead and experiencing my first moments of perdition. I decided, however, that I should prevent a car fire from taking place so that my family could have an open-casket funeral and so I reached forward and turned off the still-running ignition.

What I mean, really, is "say no to drugs, kids". Even--ESPECIALLY--when you have no idea that they're in your system.

[MLE]

I agree with the previous assertation that you need to post more often.

[Grislygus]

BATTLE SCARS

I insist that this be eternally referred to as a hash mark

[Dr. Octogonopus]

I agree with the previous assertation that you need to post more often.

Hell, I haven't seen you post in a while.

[Fat_Hippo]

She's over in the Art Forum mainly.

[Pub Lover]

That & the lady has issues. :(

[MLE]

That, I do. A lot of them, unfortunately. No, they will not be shared publicly.

[Pub Lover]

I think I was as public on this matter as was allowable.

[Tadao]

Which issues do you have? I have issues 8-12.

[Sethomas]

BACK ON TOPIC:

Coming from a family with lots of medical experience/qualifications/connections, it seemed totally stupid that I should have to get the sutures removed by a hospital nurse. They said it'd be 14 days before I should have them taken out, which today was the 14th day. I figured I'd wait until I next see my RN mother, my MD/MPH sister, or my RN aunt and have one of THEM take it out. It seemed to work out well because my parents need to work on stuff here at the family property I maintain this weekend anyways, and if I needed a doctor to look at it then my sister has the entire month of April off from work.

Instead, my sister decides that she'll have a cosmetic surgery performed on her as a way to begin her vacation. Two hours of anesthesia for her to have a lump of fat removed from her scalp that isn't even visible. My mother decided that these harrowing two hours will necessitate her motherly presence, so she went off to Manhattan to provide it for a week. Since my sister shares an apartment in Brooklyn with my cousin (even though she has a room in Manhattan half the time anyways), my RN aunt decided that she needed to visit the Big Apple at this time as well, perhaps to maintain cosmic balance.

Then my sister's going to the Dominican Republic for two weeks or some shit.

So, yeah. It seems likely that I'll just take the stitches out all by myself. That seemed like a scary thought to me until I looked at it this morning and realized that two of them fell out entirely in my sleep. When I was at work today, I looked down and found that the only one that looked like it was still bearing a functional tension had snapped and I had to pull it out with my left hand. For whatever reason, the cut in this area is more pronounced now than it was last week. This implies inflammation which implies infection which implies that I'm fucked, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It does mean that the scar is going to be more unsightly than predicted, I guess.

[Nick]

You might wanna have that looked out before it starts oozing puss, and rots off.

[Pub Lover]

IF IT DOES FALL OFF SETH DOESN'T HAVE TO WORRY AS HE CAN USE IT THE NEXT TIME HE SOAKS ABSINTH IN WORMWOOD OR WHATEVER CRAZY SHIT HE DOES NOW TO GET HIS ERUDITE ROCKS OFF

[Sethomas]

Actually, I'm surprised Pub hasn't made note of "Seth's OLD body ornamentation". That might have only come up when he was AWOL, but I doubt that would make as much of a difference as it should in Pub's case.

As much as I love to bring it up in conversations with the ladies, it's hard to do so without extreme weirdness. It's just hard to transition conversation topics to skin bridges and the fact that I decorated mine for form and function. If not for my long-sleeved shirt and bowtie fixation, I'd have many different t-shirts in all sorts of colors and patterns that all say "Ask me about my dick" and I'd wear them anytime I went to the bar.

If anyone could make me a button to pin that message to my shirt, I'd appreciate it.

Seth makes the strangest jumps between expressing his philosophical genius in one post and then sticking stuff in his dick in the next.

[Nick]

Yep, that's enough for me. All I need to know.

[Girl Drink Drunk]

Scurry back to the Article Discussion board, please.

[Sethomas]

So, even though it doesn't medically need it, when I work the cash register I cover my wound with dressings to avoid freaking people out. I joked that I'd NOT do that the last day I worked with stitches in, but I wasn't planning on it.

I got pulled off the register Saturday night, the last night I'd have the stitches, and was told to do some clerical work. I took off the dressing to work more efficiently, and after a few hours I got called back to the register when they were flooded. I forgot to put the dressing back on, and the very first customer I dealt with was pretty freaked out.

Just now, I told someone I'd meet her at a bar and I looked over at my work shirt and saw the name tag pin on it. I thought that maybe I should tape the message above over my name and wear that to the bar tonight.

Then, the two situations just kind of came together in my head. If I went into work, as it happens that'd be our Senior Discount Day, with a badge on that says "Ask me about my dick", I can't imagine anything good coming from that.

[Pub Lover]

Couger sex.

[Sethomas]

You didn't just mistake me for SevenForce, did you?

[Pub Lover]

If that was even possible then I would have said something about his fetishes for Asians & feet. :x

AChimp had a couger thing though, so who knows.

[Sethomas]

Anyways.

Pulled out another one a few days ago. I kept telling myself I'd sit down and remove the others.

So, just now, I did.

Video forthcoming!

[Tadao]

I really don't know why they insist that a nurse should take out the stitches. I've had many stitches in my life time so far, and it doesn't hurt to remove them and looks farely easy. I guess they might just want to see if everything is ok with the finger.

[Sethomas]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVmidmv1exE

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is the most amazing thing any of you fuckfaces have ever seen.

[Colonel Flagg]

Nope, seeing my lacerated arm an instant before it began gushing blood and bodily fluids was by far and away more amazing. But that was 37 years ago, and I was far more easily impressed back then.

[Sethomas]

Well, there's the source of confusion: you remember an event that was 37 years ago. This makes you a demographic anomaly, and because of this you're more or less immune to the broad generalizations that would otherwise hold true for statements made about the people who read these boards. I wouldn't worry about it too much. We can't say with any certainty that your social skills are sufficiently underdeveloped as to fit within our normal comfort range, but having proof that you've been a contributing member of society isn't a ban-worthy offense either.

If nothing else you can keep Max and Cosmo Electrolux company when they make threads asking for advice on adult continence issues. This happens regularly since they can't remember things too well anymore and they don't know it's been done before.

[Girl Drink Drunk]

:lol

[Dr. Octogonopus]

Speaking of body ornamentations, I pierced my right cheek a few days ago, and it still bleeds pretty good every time i move the hook. think i should replace it with a barbell or stud? would that help it heal?

[Pandajuice]

Why your cheek of all places?

[Dr. Octogonopus]

I thought my ear would be too dumb, and my cheek is less sensitive than the rest of my mouth and nose, for some reason.

[Pandajuice]

Is it, like, right in the middle of your cheek though? (pix plx)

[Tadao]

Doc, I am a facial piercing fanatic. I have 9 and I don't wear piercings anymore. Here is the best advice I ever got. Mix 3 tablespoons of sea salt with 1 gallon of distilled water. It has to be sea salt and it has to be distilled water. Sea salt is in someway a natural thing in healing (i forget how) and distilled water doesn't have all the junk in it. It will heal naturally, not fast though. You don't want fast. It will cause scaring and mess the hole up ever so slightly.

[Pub Lover]

http://i267.photobucket.com/albums/ii285/tadao_mockery/Human/Piercingmedium.jpg

Oh for a huge magnet. :(

[Tadao]

We discussed this before. Magnets won't work.

[executioneer]

unless they have a nickel allergy

[Pub Lover]

We discussed this before. Magnets won't work.

You're thinking of Mexicans.

[Dr. Octogonopus]

I have a piercing about an inch away from the side of my mouth, and I put a fish hook (that hasn't been used and I cleaned it, of course) into it, and I think it looks sorta cool. Besides, I can take it out.
I'll post a pic when I get my camera working again; it went kaput after I took it through the aquifer caves. Great pics, though, but that's for another thread someday.