Freak Accident

Weekends have not been kind to me the last couple of weeks.

The weekend before last, I (unknowingly) ran over a piece of metal in my car and had to get the tire patched. Translation: I realized my tire was making the universal “I’m losing air” sound about a mile from home, pulled over and checked it, drove home at about 2 miles an hour, and ran into the house yelling up the stairs for Sweet Dub to come down. It then became his responsibility to fix the tire. You know, I consider myself a feminist, but this is one instance where I am happy to play the helpless damsel in distress because I just don’t want to deal with it.

So, this past weekend. Sweet Dub is lying on the couch, sick as a dog. Cily is asleep. Viva is…hmm, I’m not sure what she’s doing. She may be out in the back yard trying to find the latest cat who has decided we belong to him.

I am upstairs, having decided that our house is a Den of Filth and that I am going to clean from the top down. I start with the bathroom. I have already scrubbed the toilet and the tub. I am in the tub with my jeans rolled up, scrubbing the glass shower doors. I slide one of the glass panels over to get to the other one better, and all of a sudden there is a big crash. I am no longer holding the door, because the door is no longer there. I am standing ankle deep in bare feet in chunks of glass. Beads of blood are already starting to form on my arms. I realize if I move I am going to really hurt myself. I scream for Sweet Dub, who is already awake and moving because he heard the crash. He and Viva run upstairs. He and I both yell at Viva to stay out of the room because the glass has shattered all over the floor as well as the tub. It is in the toilet. It is in my hair. It is in the rolled-up cuffs of my jeans, and in the hood of my sweatshirt. Part of the shower door is still swinging a bit from the frame of the shower. Viva is whimpering. Cily sleeps through the whole thing.

Sweet Dub walks carefully into the room in sneakers and lifts me out of the tub. When I put my feet down, I cut myself – which I think was inevitable because tiny slivers of glass are clinging to my feet. I stand out in the hallway right outside the bathroom and carefully pull off my clothes, which we throw into a bucket. I have a couple of really deep gashes in my hands, on the outer parts of my thumbs, below the knuckle, and my left wrist is slashed up. I also have many smaller scratches all over my hands and feet. I wrap my hands in an old T-shirt and apply pressure. It could have been worse. What if Viva had been in the shower? I don’t think she would have had the presence of mind not to move, so she would have been cut up much worse.

Our landlord’s father is the one who put the shower in. It’s supposed to be a floating glass door, i.e. it doesn’t have a frame around the sides or bottom, only at the top. So when it jumped the track a millimeter, it hit the tub and with no frame to protect it, fell to pieces. At least, that’s what we think happened.

I don’t want to replace it. A tension rod and a shower curtain, and I’m all good.

On Sunday, Sweet Dub said to me, “Can we just make a pact? Can we go one weekend where you’re not screaming ‘HON-EAAY!!!’ with the latest disaster up or down the stairs?”

I’d like that. I really would.