Last October, my wife and I moved to a new house. When we decided to put our old house on the market, there were several things we needed to do to get ready. Each week there was a new area of focus for this preparation. One weekend, I decided to tackle the task of getting the yard ready. Our old house had a big shop behind the house and a fence around the backyard area. There was a bank between the shop and the fence on two sides of the building. Trees and brush had grown up around this area. I decided to do some cleaning up around this area of the shop.
A small tree had died and fallen over. It was a little larger than what I could handle so I got a hacksaw out of the shop to cut it up. The tree was easy to cut but when I was done, the saw fell out of my hand. The blade landed on my foot. I was wearing sandals. When I looked down at my foot, I could see the jagged edge of the blade laying across the top of my foot. It didn’t look like it had done any damage. But when I moved the blade, I could see blood pooling on top of my foot. As I walked to the house, I could feel the blood pooling in my sandal. My goal was to get in the master bath to doctor my foot without getting blood on the way there. I wasn’t very concerned about the deck of our house although it had recently been painted. The floor in our living room was tile and easy to clean. I was concerned about going through our master bedroom because the carpet had recently been cleaned. I was able to get to the bathroom without getting anything on the carpet. I put my foot in the tub and started running water over it. I could see the blood squirting from the wound with each beat of my pulse. I started putting pressure on the wound but couldn’t get at a good angle to do it right. I decided I needed help.
I thought my wife was in the front yard working on flower beds. I tried yelling hoping that everything was quiet enough outside that she could hear me. I soon realized this was not going to work. I would have to go back through our bedroom to get to the front door, open it and hopefully get her attention. I would have to do this while putting pressure on the wound on my foot without getting blood on the carpet. By some miracle, I was able to get through our bedroom with only a minimal amount of blood getting on the carpet. Opening the door was a bit tricky because I needed to keep pressure on my foot. I released my foot just long enough to open the door. I was able to get my wife’s attention soon. I sat in the floor and elevated my foot on the steps in our front hallway while she put pressure on the wound. It finally stopped bleeding. Within an hour, I was back in the yard with a bandaged foot in steel toed boots finishing up my job.
Our house sold relatively fast after we put it on the market. One night while we were packing, my wife was going through the books on the shelves in our bedroom. She was filling boxes with books and she had a tape gun to close the boxes. She was having trouble with the tape dispenser tearing the tape. She would use extra force to pull the tape gun in hope that the tape would tear easier. One time when she did this, the blade of the tape gun came down across the small toe on one of her feet. She was only wearing sandals. The blade cut a piece of flesh on her toe. The cut was still attached but the skin and meat flapped over. And it didn’t want to stop bleeding. She did this while standing on the carpet that I had been so careful not to bleed on. We moved her from that area to somewhere that we could both see her foot better. I had to go to a store to get more supplies for us to wrap her foot. We were able to get it bandaged ok but any time we tried to redress the wound, it would start bleeding again. The next morning, we decided she needed to go to the doctor. She received 8 stitches in her toe. We were encouraged by friends and family to start wearing better shoes while we were moving.