WARNING: Not for the squeamish!

(Just in case you missed the title of this post, I wanted to reiterate that what follows will contain some rather graphic descriptions of blood and gore; not slasher-movie bad, obviously, but as someone who grew up with a blood phobia, I know I would have appreciated being warned.)

So I just finished hosing blood and the remains of my mother's amputated fingertip off of our garage door.

Let me say that again: my mother amputated the tip of her finger in our garage door! Yes!

Last night our power went out, so when she left for her job this morning she had to open and close the garage door manually. When she was closing it again, she managed to get the tip of her finger pinched in the door. I was still in bed, and so woke up to screams of, "I THINK I NEED TO GO THE HOSPITAL!" I hastily dressed and drove her out to the ER.

My mom takes blood thinners for a heart condition, and so she bled EVERYWHERE. Fortunately, there were no more pressing injuries ahead of us at the ER, so she was taken back to a room fairly quickly. The worst part was that every person who entered her room (probably about 10 total) opened with, "OMG, what happened?!" and my mother got to relive the embarassing and agonizing story over and over again.

The best part was that there was a TV in the room, and so when the hand doctor (what is the name for that?) came in to operate on her finger we got to watch Martha Stewart throughout the procedure. I was fine and not squeamish at all until he started snipping at the bone (he had to remove the finger down to the top knuckle) and I had to pretend that the crunching noise I heard was someone exhuberantly enjoying a bag of potato chips, and not the man chopping at my mother's finger bone with what looked like a pair of needle-nosed pliers.

I'm glad I called into work early and told them I wouldn't be able to make, as naturally we were there all day, and I wasn't in the mood to teach math to whiny children afterwards.

All in all it went pretty well, and now I can affectionately refer to my mother as "stumpy", just in time for the family reunion and my brother's wedding!

Fic: "Where Two Paths Cross"

Title: "Where Two Paths Cross"
Fandom: Doctor Who, "NuWho"
Characters/Pairing: Amy, Rory, OCs, Aunt Sharon; mentions of Augustus and Tabetha Pond; Amy/Rory
Rating: PG
Word Count: 6,578

Summary: "Amy Pond has lived through two very different childhoods, but there are some common threads between them..."

This is my entry for the LiveJournal community she_is_to_me's second challenge; prompts are included with the story.

( Amy Pond has grown up twice. )