{"id":76385,"date":"2016-12-27T04:56:32","date_gmt":"2016-12-27T09:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=76385"},"modified":"2016-12-26T13:04:33","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T18:04:33","slug":"column-the-human-condition-hubby-the-impaler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=76385","title":{"rendered":"COLUMN: The Human Condition – Hubby the Impaler"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Martha<\/a>
Martha E. Conway<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Editor’s note: Reprinted from 2005.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

July was an interesting month\u2026 Interesting in the sort of hold-your-breath-and-wait-for-the-next-shoe-to-drop sort of way. I am not sad to see it pass.<\/p>\n

My husband works in a fairly dangerous branch of the construction trades with plenty of opportunities to get blown up or electrocuted. In the course of a day, he works with pointed things, sharp things, motorized sharp things and, my personal favorite, motorized spinning things that shoot smaller metallic, sharp and pointy things into your eyes. But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself.<\/p>\n

July 4, my daughters and I decided to go shopping at the Big Box Store Everyone Loves to Hate, just to get out of the heat. As we entered the store, it occurred to me one of us ought to turn on her cell phone, and I quote: \u201cJust in case your dad calls looking for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

From my lips to God\u2019s ears. Well, somebody\u2019s ears, because within minutes, my cell phone rang.<\/p>\n

\u201cHello?\u201d I said. (I don\u2019t know why we say \u2018hello?\u2019 as a question when we answer the phone, but it\u2019s better than some of the alternatives.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere are you?\u201d Hubby asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re at [Big Box Store, which shall not be named].\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh. Well, I got a splinter in my arm, and I think I\u2019m going to have to go to the hospital and get it removed. I think I can get myself there, but I\u2019m not so sure I\u2019ll be able to drive home, depending on what they have to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

My heart did a little jump. Hubby, formerly known as \u201cDo you think this needs stitches?\u201d Conway in his teens\u00a0never seeks medical attention. Ever. Many years ago, he called me at work to see if I could drive him to the hospital because he\u2019d cut his hand. I figured it was an amputation. I was pretty darned close.<\/p>\n

I told him I\u2019d meet him at the Community General Hospital emergency room in Syracuse with a spare driver. We arrived to find him sitting in x-ray with a tiny puncture wound on one side of his forearm and an unnerving lump on the other. Whatever went in apparently traveled several inches from its entry point and lodged in the muscle.<\/p>\n

I rubbed his leg and held his hand and watched them cut\u2026 and cut\u2026 and cut… and dig\u2026 and was completely grossed out. Finally, a wooden spike about three inches long and a quarter-inch wide appeared in the forceps. A few stitches, some gauze pads and antibiotics later we were on our way.<\/p>\n

Ten days later, we were back. This time for the metal-fragment-in-the-eye incident. Ironically, it required three medical centers and a sharp metal spinning thing (on a much, much smaller scale) to get it back out.<\/p>\n

The other night, I was heading to bed and walked in on hubby watching TV in the bedroom. \u201cTLC\u201d does not stand for tender, loving care, either. It is a supposedly educational station. I walk in on a photo of a man with a frog-hunting pitchfork \u2013 with barbed points \u2013 through his face. He is watching \u201c101 Things Removed From the Human Body: From a bag of four-inch carpenters\u2019 nails in a man’s stomach to a two by four through a woman’s face, follow the astonishing medical list of things removed from the human body.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOH, MY GOD, YOU\u2019RE TAKING A TUTORIAL?!\u201d I yelled at his surprised countenance.<\/p>\n

Then I went to bed and waited for August to arrive\u2026and peeked through my fingers at the screen to see what may lie ahead.<\/p>\n

Martha E. Conway is <\/em>publisher of the Madison County Courier.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: Reprinted from 2005. July was an interesting month\u2026 Interesting in the sort of hold-your-breath-and-wait-for-the-next-shoe-to-drop sort of way. I am not sad to see it pass. My husband works in a fairly dangerous branch of the construction trades with plenty of opportunities to get blown up or electrocuted. In the course of a day, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23677,23808,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion","category-top-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43meu-jS1","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/madisoncountycourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/Conway-Martha-092812.jpg?fit=226%2C290&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}