Karma Grabs a Mouthful of Val

You know that sick day I took yesterday to pay a visit to the lab for a blood draw? Karma has wasted no time in exacting retribution. Evened the Steven that very day, in fact. For though I was indeed entitled to my sick day for a medical procedure, Karma failed to concur.

The very sick day I was going about my merry way, feeling fine, sporting an unsightly hematoma the size of a Kennedy half dollar on the inside of my right elbow, Karma flexed her maw. Took a Jaws-like chomp on my ample behind. Made sure that a sick day was used for sickness. Or painful accidental injury.

It was like some creepy Final Destination movie. No matter what steps I might have taken to avoid my destiny, Karma would even the score. There I was last evening, happy as a clam in a blue recliner in front of a basement big-screen TV, when Karma struck. I had just picked up one of the 1503 mail-order catalogs that a carrier from the dead-mouse-smelling post office had crammed into my makeshift metal-pipe mailbox earlier in the day. Because those mail-order companies don't want people along the mail chain-of-command shopping willy-nilly in random catalogs, they seal the top and bottom with two clear circles of stickiness that must be severed in order to turn the pages. I have a habit of slipping a finger inside the pages, and poking at those sticky circles like a blunt, fleshy letter-opener.

I had three sticky circles severed. I was on the last one when Karma took her bite. Like a piranha she was. Forget the fleshy buttocks. She went right for the jugular of my finger-webbing. The base of my right badfinger, where it joins forces with my pointer. YEEOUCH! I think I heard the slicing sound. Like a paper cutter blade slashing through construction paper. Blood oozed out. You'd think there would have been a shortage, after the leak from my median cubital vein forming the newest Great Lake, which I have named Lake Elbowio, just under the surface of my translucent old-lady skin. I hollered to Genius, who was flitting around with some photographs he had taken, printing them for wallpapering his room. "EEWWW!" So much for sympathy. I staunched the effluence with a tissue.

Flash to the future. Today. Did you know that a paper cut can be reopened when you are doing the good deed of carrying a Popular Photography magazine to your son's room? And that while you notice the pain, you are a tough old bird, and may not notice the seepage until you are on your way to town to grab a 44 oz. Diet Coke. And furthermore, did you know that Karma will rub salt in your wound under the guise of Germ-X while you are doing the good deed of cleaning up that bodily fluid before entering a business establishment? Note to Self: Germ-X in a paper cut hurts like a...like Germ-X in a paper cut.

But back to yesterday's sick day. Karma wasn't through with me yet. She took my crown. The last one on the bottom left, just in front of the pulled wisdom tooth.

I must get to work evening the balance. Do any of you need assistance in crossing the street?