I was in the middle of a presentation when my phone vibrated against the table. I ignored it. It vibrated again. And again.
I apologized to the client and picked up. The sound on the other end was terrifying. It was a ragged, gasping wheeze.
“Sarah?” he choked out.
“Mark? What’s wrong?”
My husband called me from work, breathing heavily.
“‘I’m going to the ER,’” he gasped. “‘It’s bad. There’s blood.’“.
The room spun. Blood. Bad. My mind immediately conjured up horrific scenarios—industrial accidents, severed limbs, a shark attack in the break room.
I left my laptop open. I left my purse. I rushed to the hospital. I ran red lights. I prayed to every deity I could name. I burst through the automatic doors of the Emergency Room like a SWAT team member, scanning the room for a gurney, a team of trauma surgeons, a priest.
I didn’t see a trauma team. I saw Mark.
He was sitting in a plastic chair, looking pale and tragic, holding his hand protectively against his chest. I ran over, sliding on my knees to be at his level.
“Mark! Oh my god! Where is the wound? Did they stop the bleeding?”
He looked at me with dewy, martyr-like eyes and slowly held up his index finger.
I found him in the waiting room with a Band-Aid on his finger.
I stared at the beige strip. It wasn’t soaked through. It wasn’t even the big size. It was the standard strip.
“What… what is that?” I whispered, confused.
“It was a filing incident,” he whispered, his voice trembling.
He had a paper cut.
I stood up slowly. The adrenaline in my veins began to curdle into a pure, white-hot rage. “You called me… you made me think you were dying… for a paper cut?”
He looked offended. “He said he ‘felt faint’ and needed professional observation,” as if a microscopic slit in his epidermis was grounds for a medically induced coma.
I looked at the triage nurse, who was actively avoiding eye contact with us, probably out of second-hand embarrassment. I realized then that I wasn’t married to a warrior; I was married to a man who viewed a rogue sheet of A4 paper as a lethal weapon. I left him there to be “observed” and went to get a coffee, because one of us needed fluids, and it definitely wasn’t the victim of the stationary drawer.
