Today I was assigned to garde manger, which is cold plates, salads, fruits, etc. Since we’re starting up a heat wave here, the Chef said we would have a lot of cold stuff available, which means while I am not in the heat of the kitchen, I am responsible for a lot of stuff.
First thing I started after breakfast is slicing the roast beef. I got a demo from one of my classmates, and his parting words were “remember, the slicer doesn’t care what it slices. Meat is meat.” Truer words were never spoken.
I had just started slicing, when one of the higher-up chefs (who just HAPPENED to be visiting this morning) asked me if the roast beef was going to be cooked. I replied, “no,” and then realized, I should have been wearing gloves. Duh, ready to eat and all that. I said this to him, he smiled and said “Right!” So off I go to find gloves. Come back, continue slicing. Finish slicing, turn off the slicer. Wait a few seconds to make sure it was done spinning, reach in and grab the roast beef. Stabbing pain in my pinky. God f’ing dammit. Pull back, blood coming out of the tip of my glove. Wonderful. Okay, so let’s assess the damage. Pull off the glove, yeah, it’s bleeding pretty badly. (I remember some small part of my brain saying, “Wow, neat, the tip of my finger is missing”) I washed it off, grabbed a paper towel, and attempted to stop the blood flow. Well, my finger would have none of that, it just got worse for spite. I stood there for about 10 minutes, but it was not slowing down at all. Chef walks past, sees me holding my finger, and asks if I cut myself. Now had this been anyone else, I would have replied, “Nope, I picked an award winning booger out of my nose, and I’m trying to protect it until the Guinness people can get here with a camera. Heeere’s your sign.” However, since this WAS an instructor, I think I said something like, “it’s not too bad, but it won’t stop bleeding.” My brain immediately screamed at me, “those are contradictory statements!!!” (“Shaddap brain, or I’ll stab you with a q-tip!” – Homer Simpson.) After about 5 more minutes of standing there bleeding (“it’s only a flesh wound!”) the Chef tells me to go sit down in the cafeteria. Apparently there’s some sorta health code about bleeding in a kitchen that I wasn’t aware of.
I sat for about an hour or so, applying pressure, until I thought I had it under control. I went back into the kitchen, put on a bandage, put another one around it so the first one wouldn’t fall off (tip of the finger is tough to keep a bandage on.) Chef asks if I was okay, I said yes. Immediately after saying that, my finger said, “that’s what you think!” and proceeded to soak the bandages with blood. I pulled them off, grabbed another paper towel, and said, “Okay, maybe not.” Back out to sit down.
Half an hour later, Chef says that if it still hasn’t stopped, I needed to go to the hospital. Just what I was trying to avoid – my last trip there was not one I wanted to repeat. But, I wasn’t allowed back in the kitchen, and I already had to make up the class since I missed so much of it at this point, so what the hell. It’s not like I can sit out there during lunch service – that rule about bleeding in a kitchen may not apply to the cafeteria, but it sure does make people lose their appetites (especially when said bleeder is wearing chef’s brigade.)
Someone from Student Services comes up and takes me to the hospital emergency room. The good news is now I can graduate – the school apparently assumes that if you haven’t injured yourself severely enough to require a hospital visit, you aren’t working hard enough. No question on my participation, but I can kiss that “Exceeds Standards” grade in kitchen equipment goodbye. However, if I lose a finger, I can apply that towards “Graduation with Distinction.” I haven’t decided yet just how dedicated I am, but I have resolved NOT to do that on a day we make chili.
She drops me off at the ER, I check in, tell them what happened, and realize that by this time the wound has stopped bleeding. Nice timing, I say as I hear my finger chuckling to itself. You know how everyone has a theater of the mind where they often play out situations the way they expect or wish them to happen? This is one of those cases where most people would you feel like they have to justify why they are there, so they start explaining how it was spouting out of their finger like a fountain, the nurse taking their info would look in horror and congratulate them for being so strong, and immediately rush them into the ER in case it breaks open and the patient passes out from blood loss. In my mind’s theater, I explained that all I would have needed was another half an hour and it would have stopped on its own. I could have triumphantly returned to the kitchen to finish my cold deli platters, set up the salad bar, and then make the bernaise sauce we were told to do for a grade; the nurse would have laughed and said yeah, those instructors always do panic at the sight of blood, we get students up here all the time who really don’t need emergency care, and then she would have put on her scuba gear and smacked me with a trout, and I would have flown back to school with a passing flock of sea turtles.
Okay, so my mind’s theater is located at the corner of Surreal Street and Dali Boulevard.
So she takes the info, which was easier since I had already been there not much more than a month ago (!!) and sends me to Fast Track care. What the hell for, I have no clue, since I wasn’t even bleeding at this point. They call me in, the guy looks at it, and says that I was right to come in since it might have gotten infected. I doubted it, as I had just pumped about 4 pints of blood through it. (Someone get me a Red Cross button that says, “I Gave at the Kitchen.”) He tells the nurse-trainee (who was maybe 15) to “tube it.” I had no idea what this was until she comes over with what appears to be a small metal Christmas tree wrapped in gauze. She puts goop on my finger (which bore a strong resemblence to the goop they put on my nose – see “Archive of Stupidity” for June) and then places the Christmas tree over my finger. She spun it around, raised it, twisted it, then spun down the other direction, repeating about 40 or 50 times until my finger looked like they had transplanted it from Mickey Mouse. This was, as she said, to prevent infection. Wonderful, I’ll take a box of gauze to go please. Then she pats me on the head and sends me on my way! Total time wasted, 3 hours. I took a bus back to town and managed to get back to class just in time for it to be over. Tomorrow I have to talk to Chef about when and how to make up the missed class time. He’s not upset over it at least. He said that kitchen accidents occur every 10 minutes. I promised to try to improve to about an hour or so.
The really sick part of this is that one of my classmates did the same thing last Monday. He cut way deeper into his finger and was immediately taken to the ER, where they stuck it back together with superglue and sent him home. Me, they turn into Emeril Lugosi. Upside of it is, four people told me that those kinds of bandage jobs draw a lot of sympathy. Downside is that I’d have to embellish exactly how it happened. If I would have cut it on the slicer while saving a little old lady from being mowed down by a bus while she was crossing the kitchen, that would be heroic. WEIRD, but heroic. There would be movie producers banging on my door. I can see it now: “The Final Cut.” “The Lady or the Slicer.” “The Sharper They Are, the Deeper they Cut.” I can picture Sharon Stone in that last one.. she’s having sex with a man whose wrists are tied to the bedposts, and just as things really get hot and steamy, she reaches under the covers and pulls out – a meat slicer! Definitely Oscar material.
Cutting my finger while slicing roast beef just doesn’t have that “newspaper headlines” ring to it. My life is so boring.