drip, drip...
May. 8th, 2015 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xelaI'm moving across the hall at work — more on that later. We did most of the necessary work yesterday, and having an empty cube for the new person on Monday should be no problem.
Early this morning found me crawling around on the floor, doing final assembly on my new sit-stand desk. (See previous remark about "more on that later.") About an hour ago I realized I was missing a tool, and got up to get it. I stood there for a moment, looking over the situation and trying to think of anything else I was going to need that I didn't have handy. So my eyes were sort of vaguely pointed at the carpet at my feet — one of those quasi-random office carpet patterns designed to hide stains — but I wasn't really looking at it. Until I went "Huh, that's weird." Right at my feet there were some random red splotches in the primarily blue ground of the carpet. I looked at other parts of the floor to see if it was part of the pattern, or whether a previous occupant had stained it: No similar blotches. I bent over to touch it, expecting to find something like hardened chewing-gum or maybe a burnt spot.
And touched something damp.
Damp. And red.
Ah, crap.
As most of you know, I've been on a mild blood-thinner regimen for a decade now. This plays especially poorly with psoriasis — as in, a mild abrasion that I may not even notice can cause me to spring a leak like a small cut (bigger than shaving; smaller than knife-fight) might be reasonably expected to. Except it will take way longer than you'd expect to stop bleeding.
So felt around myself, and found blood slowly oozing out of my elbow where I had apparently abraded it on the carpet while crawling. Went to the kitchen for the first-aid supplies, washed my arm, and tried to get a look at where the blood was coming from. And realized I couldn't get myself into a position to see it. Not, at any rate, to see it well enough to put a bandaid on it.
Which basically meant I spent fifteen minutes reading a magazine while periodically daubing at my elbow witn a paper-towel, until eventually it came back white. Went back, did a cold-water cleanup of the carpet that should suffice, and went back to assembling my new desk. Finished assembling it without leaking on the carpet anymore. But it had started up again, though very slowly, by the time I got up after finishing. So I decided to write this while waiting for it to stop.
It occurs to me (did about the time I started writing this, actually) that I may want to quietly find out which of my co-workers are okay with doing a little first aid. Or at the very least, which (if any) freak-out at the sight of blood. It would have been handy to know with 100% certainty that there was someone around whose reaction to "hay, can you put a bandaid on this for me please?" would be "Yeah, sure."
Okay, tissue comes back white. Back to work.
Early this morning found me crawling around on the floor, doing final assembly on my new sit-stand desk. (See previous remark about "more on that later.") About an hour ago I realized I was missing a tool, and got up to get it. I stood there for a moment, looking over the situation and trying to think of anything else I was going to need that I didn't have handy. So my eyes were sort of vaguely pointed at the carpet at my feet — one of those quasi-random office carpet patterns designed to hide stains — but I wasn't really looking at it. Until I went "Huh, that's weird." Right at my feet there were some random red splotches in the primarily blue ground of the carpet. I looked at other parts of the floor to see if it was part of the pattern, or whether a previous occupant had stained it: No similar blotches. I bent over to touch it, expecting to find something like hardened chewing-gum or maybe a burnt spot.
And touched something damp.
Damp. And red.
Ah, crap.
As most of you know, I've been on a mild blood-thinner regimen for a decade now. This plays especially poorly with psoriasis — as in, a mild abrasion that I may not even notice can cause me to spring a leak like a small cut (bigger than shaving; smaller than knife-fight) might be reasonably expected to. Except it will take way longer than you'd expect to stop bleeding.
So felt around myself, and found blood slowly oozing out of my elbow where I had apparently abraded it on the carpet while crawling. Went to the kitchen for the first-aid supplies, washed my arm, and tried to get a look at where the blood was coming from. And realized I couldn't get myself into a position to see it. Not, at any rate, to see it well enough to put a bandaid on it.
Which basically meant I spent fifteen minutes reading a magazine while periodically daubing at my elbow witn a paper-towel, until eventually it came back white. Went back, did a cold-water cleanup of the carpet that should suffice, and went back to assembling my new desk. Finished assembling it without leaking on the carpet anymore. But it had started up again, though very slowly, by the time I got up after finishing. So I decided to write this while waiting for it to stop.
It occurs to me (did about the time I started writing this, actually) that I may want to quietly find out which of my co-workers are okay with doing a little first aid. Or at the very least, which (if any) freak-out at the sight of blood. It would have been handy to know with 100% certainty that there was someone around whose reaction to "hay, can you put a bandaid on this for me please?" would be "Yeah, sure."
Okay, tissue comes back white. Back to work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-05-08 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-08 03:36 pm (UTC)I realized this morning (when the only co-worker even remotely likely to have been here was another middle-aged male nerd with no kids) that I have, without even being conscious of it, relied all my life on sexist stereotypes when this sort of thing came up: Last time I was bleeding somewhere I couldn't bandage, I asked a female co-worker. And, thinking back, the time before that. And that if the only other person likely to have been around had been a woman, I'd have felt no hesitation in seeing if she was in. (In my own defense, that's not only because of the care-giver stereotype: imagine not being able to stand the sight of blood to be rare to nonexistent among women: how would one survive adolescence?)
no subject
Date: 2015-05-08 03:53 pm (UTC)Do some people really convulse at the sight of blood? Maybe they do. The horror at my injecting seemed to be more about the needle than the possible blood.