The cut was tiny. A small laceration on the edge of a fingertip where my wife had been trimming my son’s nails. It didn’t seem to hurt and he hadn’t even noticed it until we clocked the scarlet trail of tiny little fingerprints all over her top, his own face, and suddenly every surface to which he was adjacent.
My son was evidently delighted by his handy new capacity for self-generating finger paints. He was, therefore, quite shocked by our reaction to the Scorsese movie he was making of our sitting room. My wife yelped and seized his finger to apply pressure, and I uttered a calm and dignified shriek of horror while running to the laptop to see what one does with a bleeding finger.
The initial results varied wildly in their advice. Some said simply sucking on the scratch would do the trick, while others stopped just short of telling you how far up the arm you should cut for amputation. Several recommended I put my hands to things all good parents must have in their homes, in the manner of one of those ‘easy-peasy five-minute meals’, the kind that ask you to grab some of that unused muslin, cognac paste and elderflower heads languishing in the back of your walk-in pantry.
We, on the other hand, have a plastic box of medical stuff we keep in a cupboard. It’s big and unwieldy, functioning like a sort of reverse Tardis; massive on the outside, but somehow never big enough to hold the one thing you’re looking for. I don’t know that we’ve ever needed anything we’ve put in there. It could be that I’ve discovered a one-stop cure-all for every ailment. Simply place its treatment in that box and you need never be troubled by it again. Looking for a dried-up tube of muscle relaxant, a knee support, four types of cough medicine, or two broken thermometers? I’ve got you. Need gauze, plasters and tape? Think again!
Just as I was wondering where else I’d put those things – inside an unloved shoe or the kettle perhaps? – the doorbell rang. It was our friend Mary popping by for coffee. At least that had been the original plan. Upon hearing of our distress – and perhaps seeing the fresh child’s blood on my ghostly pale cheek and chin – she immediately took off to the chemist to grab the bits we needed, while I ran upstairs to discuss amputation options.
By the time Mary returned, his bleeding had paused. In the end, we suffered little more than a neatly bandaged fingertip that he found inordinately pleasing to chew on, and the indignity of serving our friend coffee in a room that looked like a crime scene.
Later, I placed the remaining plasters, tape and gauze in our medical box with some satisfaction, safe in the knowledge he will never suffer a single cut again in his natural life. Even so, it pays to have this stuff at your fingertips – what’s left of them, anyway.
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