Public Service Announcement: Air Registers are Sharp

The saga of my allergies goes on. So I'm not allergic to my cats anymore (which is wonderful) but I am allergic to mold in my books (dreadful, dreadful).

I had noticed that the air register near one of the bookshelves actually had black mold spores growing on it, and I'd taken a chlorox wipe and cleaned it.

Last Thursday I had a bit of extra energy when I got home from work (have no idea where from) and decided I should probably wipe down the other two registers in the living room as well. These are trapped between a cat tree and the piano, and between two bookshelves for the other one. So not easy to get to.

I was wiping them down with a chlorox wipe, leaning over. This meant that my fingers were at the wrong (acute) angle to the air register metal lines, whatever you call them. You know what I mean.

You know how cats don't like bleach? Well, when I first started out, all three cats were giving me a wide berth, wrinkling their noses and making faces at me. ("Stop making it all stinky!")

As I continued, however, they started crowding me. I thought maybe it was because I was practically in one of their cat trees, but they followed me away from the cat tree to the other side of the room to crowd in close while I wiped down that register too.

Now this is odd, I thought. Whatever could be so fascinating about this wipe that it's overcoming their natural aversion to bleach? I glanced down at it, not really thinking I'd be able to see what they were smelling, only to find that my white wipe was covered in large red blotches. Bright scarlet red.

Welcome to the world of autism. My first thought is not, "I hurt myself."

My first thought was, amusingly enough, "My air registers are bleeding?" Followed closely by, "no, that doesn't make any sense." And then, "could one of the cats have hurt themselves and bled on the air register and I wiped it off?"

No, that doesn't make sense either. I would have noticed that, plus it's bright red, fresh blood. Where did it come from if not the cats ... oh. Me.

So I looked down at my hand and sure enough, I was bleeding copiously from a slice across my first two fingers. Fairly deep on the middle finger. The same middle finger I nearly cut off at work fifteen years or so ago. (That scar is on the other side though--this slice was across the back, and almost at the nail bed.)

Sigh. I went and bandaged myself up. My middle finger refused to stop bleeding, so I put a waterproof bandaid on it and held it tightly and above heart level for ten minutes or so. Thimble was quite intrigued with this whole process and wanted to help. but bless him, didn't get into the actual bandaid. I had to unwrap it and lay it out on the bathroom counter with one hand while I pressed the injured finger of the other hand into a wad of paper towel, and Thimble could easily have gotten all kinds of investigatory closeness into the sticky upside down bandaid.

A week later the injury is nearly all healed. It's interesting that I never felt anything, not then, not later. My mom jokingly suggested I have no feeling in that finger, but she may be actually correct. The (much deeper) slice I gave it way back when left the tip of the finger feeling very weird ever since--not pain, but just "strange." It is entirely possible that the back of the finger above that area lacks nerves now. Which means I have one more thing I have to be careful of.

I'll tell you, though. When I went to wipe down the air registers in my bedroom two days later, I made sure to wear thick gardening gloves!