Are You a Tough Girl?

Dremel



+



 Long Hair

 =

 2 stitches in my eyelid

I really don't know how to better explain what my Saturday night consisted of other than the above equation. Before I go on explaining, please know for all of you who are concerned that I am relatively fine and there shouldn't be too many lasting effects from this incident other than a new found respect for the Dremel.

Now for all the fun details including some gross pictures so consider this your warning if you are squeamish.



This is the tip of the dremel.
It used to be in one piece
and straight.



Last night I was sitting in my room working on some Christmas presents which I can't really explain any more other than the fact that it required the use of a Dremel because someone who reads this blog is the recipient of this present and I don't want to give it away. Anyway, I was dremel-ing away and out of nowhere my hair got stuck in the tip of the Dremel which because the Dremel spins caused the entire tool to wind up my hair and fly into my eye. The really odd part was that I was strangely calm when this happened. I grabbed the Dremel and held it away from my face and managed to turn off the power. Once I turned it off, my hair unwound from it with no problem and I started to try and figure out what exactly I had injured. Honestly at this point, I was just relieved I hadn't lost a chunk of hair to the power tool. That's when I felt a drip of something hit my hand and realized I couldn't really see out of my right eye and then I quickly came to the conclusion that rocking a bald spot for the holidays was really the least of my concerns.

I went and checked my eye in the mirror in my room and was excited to see that I still had an eyeball all in one piece, but there was a fair amount of blood dripping off my face. I decided the best thing to do was to get Kate to come check out the damage. It took a couple of yells and a "No this is really important!", but she came down the hallway to my room to see what all the fuss was about and after a preliminary "Don't freak out, but I'm going to show you something", I moved my hand off my eye and she was greeted with a site similar to this:

We went into the bathroom where we managed to clean off some of the blood and we determined that my only real injury was a cut on my eyelid and that a potentially amazing black eye was in the works. After some convincing from Kate, we headed off to the Emergency Room to get my eye looked at along with Kevin and my crew leader Tony and his wife Liz.

After waiting about two hours in the ER and explaining my story too many times to count, the doctor finally came in and looked at my eye and assured me they would be able to fix my eye up in no time. The doctor then asked me, "Are you a tough girl?" I knew at this precise moment that I was in trouble and all I could manage to say was "I guess we're about to find out". The problem with cutting your eyelid is that the area is too small to really numb so he had to just stitch it up without giving me anything beforehand. He assured me that it would feel like a bee sting, but I beg to differ. I have been stung multiple times since coming to Kentucky as the house we're working on currently is basically a breeding ground for waspers and I can assure you that getting your eyelid stitched back together hurts significantly more than getting stung. Thankfully, it was only two stitches and I was sent on my way with some antibiotic ointment and these words of wisdom: "Bethanie, when they tell you to keep your eye on the power tools; they don't mean it literally".

Today, I woke up to a much more purple looking eye than in the above photo and a sense of appreciation for the fact that this could have been a much more tragic story ending in me now having one glass eye. So all in all, I really must say as terrible as this story sounds I'm just thankful that I still have both my eyes, I'm not sporting a bald spot on the front of my head, and I will now look pretty stinkin' rugged for Thanksgiving. 

The morning after