An ear for an ear...

My daughter reminded me of this story last night and I had to write about it.  It is bizarre, yet, totally true.  Back in 2004, Jay was working for a different company and was in charge of a handful of employees and their whereabouts.  One morning around 5:20 a.m., we heard his cell phone ringing.  You know that feeling when you're awaken from a dead sleep and hear a phone.  Ugh.  Jay shoots out of bed like a canon and runs to the kitchen to grab his phone from his drawer.  The next thing I know I hear him telling his employee he has to hang up and he yells at me "Sarah, I need help."

Well, my alarm wasn't set to go off for another 15 minutes and I really wasn't all that awake so I ignored him.  I hear another plea for help, "Sarah, get in here, I'm bleeding."  Oh brother.  Here I go.  I come around the corner of our counter and into the kitchen and there is blood pouring from his ear pooling all over the floor.  He goes over to the kitchen sink and gets some paper towels.  I, in my shocked and somewhat drowsy state, am confused and trying to figure out what in the world has happened...but even more than that, I'm noticing all this blood on my kitchen floor.  I must get the mop and clean up this mess.  So I head for the mop while I try to make sense of his story.

While running to the kitchen to grab his phone, as Jay's foot hit the kitchen floor, it slipped and went out from under him...he fell into the kitchen counter and the edge of the counter sliced his ear like a pair of scissors or knife had made a pass horizontally across his ear.  It was the craziest thing I had ever seen.  And goodness can an ear bleed!  So we put a plan into action, had my mom come over to stay with kiddos, and headed to the ER. 

You can imagine the looks that we got when we relayed this story.  At one point they questioned us separately in the emergency room.  I suppose they hear just about everything and have to make sure that there isn't some weird domestic violence going on...only let me tell you, I probably would not go for the ear, just sayin'...I remember it finally got so bad that we would just say, "Look, we know this sounds crazy, but..."  Needless to say we got a lot of stares and quite a few snickers.

Jay received several stitches, I can't remember how many exactly, but they did a pretty good fix-up job on it.  You can barely even tell now.  He lived through it.  I got the kitchen floor back to normal...or my mom probably did while she was with the kids.  And hey, what a great story, right?  You just can't make that kind of stuff up...