"Bagel Kit"

I held my severed fingertip and stump in a towel applying pressure to staunch the blood. It was a two-handed job which made hailing a cab difficult. They kept passing me by until I stepped out on the street almost in front of one. 

“Bellevue, emergency,” I shouted, climbing in the back. The driver looked at me in his rearview mirror and pulled away. That’s when I realized my lab coat was covered in blood. No wonder the cabs wouldn’t stop. 

Nobody on the street had given me a second look either. I guess it’s true what they say about New Yorkers. I was in Manhattan working for a bagel company and I’d whacked off the tip of my finger in the appropriately named bagel guillotine. 

At the hospital emergency entrance, I handed the driver my purse and asked him to find the fare, another two-handed operation impossible for me at the moment. 

“Shall I take a tip?” he asked. 

“Take whatever you want and give me the purse back,” I snapped. Geez, the guy didn’t exhibit

a drop of sympathy. 

I went to the check-in window. A nurse was fiddling with papers. 

  

“Help!” I whined. “I’ve cut my finger tip off. I need to see someone right away,” I said, on the verge of tears or fainting. 

“Sit down, honey. It’ll be a few minutes,” she said as she waved her hand towards the waiting room, about half-filled with people looking like me-- nervous and shell-shocked.  A huge Black guy with about six inches of knife hilt protruding from his bicep sprawled over a couple of seats. He too had a towel and some kind of ice pack they’d given him. Seated next to him was another blood-soaked woman. I sat down and managed to keep my whimpers internalized. A volunteer brought me a cup of water. 

Bellevue emergency sees on average 290 patients a day. People poured in like it was a sale in Filene's basement. Everyone cooperated, giving up seats to the people who needed them most. It felt like a MASH unit. Eventually, it was my turn. I felt like apologizing for even being there after seeing how bad some of the others were.

“Bagel Kit,” the young emergency room physician shouted after I unveiled my injury. My kind of accident happened so often in New York that they kept a kit just for the purpose of reattaching fingers, guillotined off, just as mine was. There was a nice selection of sutures and needles. 

The young doctor told me I was lucky the guillotine had been clean and even luckier that I wasn’t a little bit older. He selected a needle and suture from the nice selection in the kit. 

“The older you get, the less likely bits like this will reattach. It should be fine.” He was right. But I never regained the feeling and I never typed as fast again.