Biscuit Brains and Bloody Lotion

Sometimes my brain decides that life is too boring and tries to invent excitement.

You ever hear the urban legend of the lady who thought she was shot in the grocery store parking lot? The story goes that a nice old lady loads her groceries into the backseat of her car on a sunny day. She takes her time putting the cart back in the corral and making sure she has her purse and, I don’t know, looking for a piece of hard candy in her purse. While she toodles along, her groceries are getting the ‘closed car on a hot day’ oven treatment and by the time she gets behind the wheel things have reached a boiling point. Or, to be exact, an exploding point. She hears a pop, a rush of air and next thing she knows there is warm gooey mass dripping down the back of her head. 1 + 1 = 4 and noise + gooey = gunshot wound. She scrambles for her cell phone, calls 911 and reports that she’s been shot and is currently holding her own brains in her skull. The police and paramedics arrive to find her holding a can’s worth of uncooked biscuits to her head after the can had exploded in the heat of her car. I’m sure they held their snickers to a minimum.

I’ve always enjoyed that particular urban legend…that is until it happened to me tonight.

No one has ever described me as particularly neat and I admit that is not a virtue that I posses, which is easily evidenced by my bedroom. Or to be specific, the library bag next to my bed. You see, it was a brilliant idea on my part to keep my library books all in one place and easily reachable. I can grab them whenever I want and I always know where to find them. The problem is that other things just keep slipping into that bag. A pair of socks, a bottle of ibuprofen, a bag of dried pineapple, and tonight’s culprit, a bottle of lotion.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

The hour was late, the movie was GI Joe and I was idly watching the inexplicable Brendan Fraser cameo when a spider crawled up my wall. I, a person who fears all things creepy crawly, yelped and leaped away from the wall. While scrambling off my bed, I got my foot stuck in a laundry basket and then tripped over my library bag, falling over my desk chair. (It’s a small bedroom and like I said, not so neat) As I lay there wondering where the spider went, I realized that there was something poking my leg inside the library bag. I untangled my other foot and used it to nudge away whatever was poking me only to find my trapped leg covered in liquid. I froze, my feet shoved into a library bag, my head under a desk chair, my eyes gazing at a spider slowing crawling towards the ceiling and questions running through my head. Just what had poked me in that bag? Had it punctured the skin? Was it still in my leg? Was I bleeding everywhere? If that spider got to the ceiling would I ever be able to kill it? Was the blood getting on my library books?

I lay there for several moments, trying to figure out my next step. I could feel the liquid dripping down my leg now and I felt queasy at the idea of pulling it out so I could assess the damage. Not only did I not really want to see a gaping hole in my limb, I wasn’t sure if yanking it around would make it worse. My brain kept coming up with stupid clichés like “don’t move if you get lost” or “never swim right after eating” which goes to show that my brain is mush in crisis. Finally, I decided that with the rate of drippage, I was going to need to stem the flow or start looking for a donor soon and since I lack blood typing skills, I decide to carefully easy my foot from the bag. As it came closer and closer to the top I steeled myself for the worst case scenario. A gushing wound with metal shrapnel glistening against the bright white bone where it was impaled. (okay, I guess my brain is preoccupied with drama in crisis) Finally my leg cleared the bag and I stared in shock at the carnage.

There was a wound on my leg. An angry pink scratch where a piece of plastic from the lotion bottle I had stepped on had scratched as it exploded. I watched, dumbfounded, as the sweet smelling liquid dripped down my leg and off my foot and I even noticed that it really didn’t resemble blood at all. In fact, now that I could see my leg, it didn’t even feel that much like blood. It felt more like, well, lotion, runny and a little colder than body temp. As I sat there on the floor I remembered the story about the little old lady and her brain biscuits and it made me grateful. No, not because I too thought I was grievously injured and then found out all was well.

It’s because, despite visions of blood and limb loss in my head, at least I didn’t dial 911.