Why I almost wasn’t your hairstylist.

When I got home last night, Brian was very worried about me. I was staring off into space, teary-eyed.

Brian, “Would you like some more to eat?”

Me, “I don’t know.”

All right. Who doesn’t know if they’d like more to eat?  Me. Because I had something else on my mind. Yesterday morning I woke up and wrote a very pleasant blog about why I’m a hairstylist today. A few hours later I was trying to get out of work. You know me; whatever my hand finds to do, I do it with all my might. It’s a work ethic. But what happened in between those few hours was a little incident at the gym. You see, I’m accident prone. Upon putting a dumbbell away, I ended up smashing my finger with it instead – specifically my left ring finger. I tried to shake it off, but the pain just intensified – both a fiery pain and a throbbing pain. Then I took a peek and noticed that I was bleeding under the nail. Just great. Of course my first thought was my work schedule. I had 8 ½ hours booked solid yesterday, 9 hours today and not a minute to spare tomorrow. And these are the last 3 days of work before my vacation. So if I couldn’t make yesterday’s appointments, they’d certainly have to wait almost another 2 weeks.

I iced my finger for 2 ½ hours. In the meantime I called the salon and explained my situation to our receptionist. We both knew I had no wiggle room. I was envisioning a few particular appointments that were very difficult to reschedule and decided that in the long run the pain of making them up would be worse than the pain I was currently feeling in my finger.  Except I was slightly wrong. Less than 2 hours into the work day I must’ve jolted the finger because I saw the blood begin to expand under the nail again. I was in a mental tizzy, worrying about permanently losing a nail over a haircut that was only temporary and would once again need to be reshaped in 4-6 weeks. It was a rough day.

Couple all that with the fact that I couldn’t walk my dogs that morning (what with all the finger icing). When I left for work, poor little Esther stared out the door with a Wait!-Did-you-forget-me? face. I hate that face. Because, no, I never forget her. People say that I have strong heartstrings and that this will be hard when I have kids one day. I believe that.  And poor Brian. Whenever I’m this upset, he always thinks he’s in trouble. So even though he did absolutely nothing wrong, that evening he was slinking around with a guilty look on his face. He claims that he’s not used to things not being his fault.

I couldn’t blog this morning because I still couldn’t really use my finger. This evening it feels much improved. Here’s hoping for a full recovery!