Spacebunny always enjoys these conversations:
“Hey, how’d it go? Did you guys win?”
“Well, the good news is, we won 3-2.”
“That’s great! Wait a minute….”
“Yeah, the bad news is that I’m at the hospital getting my knee stitched up.”
So, apparently I’ll be sitting around doing nothing but playing Total War and watching football this weekend. That’s not all that bad, actually, when you think about it. We had our second game in three nights yesterday evening, and while knocking off both teams put us into third place (!) with a game in hand, at a certain point late in the second half, I looked down and saw that my knee was rather bloody.
No big deal, I assumed I’d scraped it in a high-speed collision with the other team’s goalie. I got to the ball first and flipped it over him, but he got just enough finger on it to deflect it and keep it out long enough for a defender to clear. According to my teammates who saw what happened, he’d come in cleats-up, tried to take out my knee and partially succeeded. I didn’t notice it myself, being focused on the ball, and didn’t feel anything afterwards either.
Anyhow, the rules prohibit open bleeding on the field, so I took myself out and figured I’d rinse it off after the game. However, one of my teammates noticed that what I thought was just some blood welling up was actually a fairly deep gash. We wear black socks so it didn’t look that bad until, at his persistent insistence, I went to the locker room to take an early shower and get cleaned up so he could look at it.
The shower proved to be a no-go, however, as it turned out that the sock was already soaked with blood and the locker room was starting to look like an abattoir before I even managed to get my shorts off. Fortunately, I had a red shirt in my bag, so I stuck it on my knee, collected my belongings and told my teammate that perhaps he was right and a trip to the hospital was in order after all.
My teammate is obviously a true humanitarian, because he was perfectly willing to let me bleed all over his Maserati (I put my warm-ups over the seat, of course) and we got there in record time. The final score was: seven stitches, one bruised knee, one tetanus shot and I’m on the sidelines for the next two games.
It’s all good, though. I’m one of the weakest links on the team anyhow, the bruise hurts more than the gash itself and Spacebunny is wonderfully solicitous of this sort of thing. It was lovely to limp downstairs this morning and find a pretty blonde greeting me with a giant mocha and an amused smile.