Pretty Sure I Sliced My Finger On Some Bacon And Contracted Cat Scratch Fever

A couple of weeks ago, I had a fairly traumatic experience with a pound of bacon. Usually I have delightful (and tasty) experiences with bacon, so the searing pain from this occurrence caught me completely off guard.

I had just arrived home from Target with a decorative lantern, a bottle of Tide With Bleach Alternative, and a pound of bacon. Life was good. I had a new geegaw for the window ledge in the basement, some Tide because it's soccer season AKA grass stain season, and thick sliced bacon. What could possibly go wrong?

The pound of bacon sliced open the pointer finger on my left hand, that's what went wrong. I've never had a pork product turn on me so violently before this. I'm still not quite sure how this happened.

All I remember is being in my kitchen merrily singing along to some vintage Kenny Rogers tune (The Gambler. Don't judge me. You know you love it, too.) when I picked up the pound of bacon to put it in the bacon drawer in the fridge.

(Yes. I have a bacon drawer in my fridge. Don't judge me. You know you now want one, too.)

I don't know exactly what happened, but my best guess is that my hand temporarily disconnected itself from my brain, an altogether not uncommon occurrence, and forgot it was still holding the precious bacon. And because gravity and I are so not friends, the bacon started falling to the kitchen floor.

Fortunately my primal instinct to rescue something I love from certain death kicked in and my hand shot out to catch the bacon.

I'd like to pause in my retelling of this story to insert how relieved I am that this happened to me. We've all heard the stories of the superhuman things a mother will do to save her child. You know, a mom lifts an AMC Gremlin off her son or instinctively throws herself on top of her kids to save them from a canned tomato sauce slide at the local warehouse store. Stuff like that. I've never been positive that I would be the kind of mom who pushes her kid out of the path of the runaway forklift during the night stock at Target, but my instinct to sacrifice myself to save something I love immediately kicked in and I caught that bacon.

Oh yes. I caught that bacon.

And the sharp edge of the open drawer. Which managed to slice my finger open, right across the knuckle. Not the slightly less used upper knuckle by my fingertip, but the oft needed middle knuckle.

Frick on a stick it hurt.

I grabbed some bacitracin and, not wanting to take the time to fuss around finding a Band-Aid specifically designed to go on the oft used middle knuckle, I ripped open the first Band-Aid I could find.

Which, in an appropriate nod to pork, was designed to look like a hot dog in a bun.

Sorry about exposing you to the horror of my ultra-pale hand. It's really a visual testament to how much blood I lost in the Battle to Save The Bacon.

I don't know if knuckle wounds usually take a long time to heal or if my wound was just deeper and more painful than everyone else's, but this thing would not heal. Concern was starting to set in for me and I made an appointment with my doctor, WebMD's symptom checker.

Immediately I knew my fate: a rare form of knuckle cancer.

My husband informed me that isn't wasn't so much a rare form of knuckle cancer, but a combination of having poor circulation (that's true, I do) and scraping a much used finger joint.

Clearly my husband does not know what he's talking about, but I agreed to give it more time to heal.

Then the figurative other shoe dropped.

Earlier this week I was messing around with a kitten that belongs to my daughter's piano teacher. Leonard (the kitty, not the teacher) suddenly turned our lovely game of me petting his tummy and cooing about what a good little kitty he is into an attack-the-slightly-doughy-middle-aged-woman game.

I hate that game and was not amused.

The kitten won the game for two reasons:

Reason #1: Leonard changed the rules of the game without informing me or getting my permission. Had he asked I would have said "No! I hate that game. Let's go back to me petting your soft kitty fur." But he didn't ask me and I think that was very rude. Strategic on his part, but still. Rude.

Reason #2: Leonard has amazing ninja skills and scratched my finger exactly where the bacon drawer had previously attacked me. Just that morning I felt that it was time to remove the hot dog Band-Aid (not the same exact Band-Aid because that's gross. I just kept using ones from the same box). I left my weak spot extremely vulnerable. It was a rookie mistake. Leonard's ninja kitty skills were perfectly honed to find a weak spot and exploit it.

Well played, Leonard. Well played.

Now I'm convinced that I no longer have knuckle cancer but cat scratch fever.

The real disease, not the Ted Nugent song.

That would be weird.

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