Normally, I carry a first aid kit with me everywhere. I have one in my car, in my room, usually in my backpack, and in my desk.
The other night, I remembered why.
I was cutting my nails, and decided to save myself some pain and clip off my hangnail that was just begging to rip and bleed everywhere. I had done the exact same thing plenty of times before, and everything would have been fine except I apparently have no depth perception and managed to cut not only the hangnail off, but also my entire nail bed. It refused to stop bleeding for the 5 minutes I had until dinnertime, where I grabbed a napkin so I wouldn’t bleed on one of my favorite shirts.
After another 5-10 minutes, it seemed like the blood had stopped, so I took the napkin off and ate my dinner. By the time we were getting up to put away our dishes, however, I looked down and saw blood streaked all down the front of my floral shirt. Apparently, my finger didn’t want to stop bleeding – that would ruin its fun.
My friend and I sat in the dining hall, with her holding a napkin to my bleeding finger for several minutes, daring anyone to make eye contact with us. We patched me up with a neon orange bandaid so we could attend the student-run debate that evening.
For an hour, we got to watch students debate whether or not the monarchy should be abolished. I think the weirdest argument brought up was that the presence of the monarchy was psychologically damaging to British children because growing up, they know that they can’t be anything they want because they can’t be the monarch. That, and the one American that waxed poetic about what a great lady the queen is – which no one was debating about, so that point was unnecessary, but hilarious since he almost moved himself to tears.
After that, I decided it was safe to take off the bandaid. It was fine for a while, right up until I was actually in bed. I didn’t have any extra bandaids, so I ended up wrapping a paper towel around my finger and securing it with sticky face mask. It worked surprisingly well.
Clearly this was a night of ingenuity – from the debate to the finger debacle.
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