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Monday, December 30, 2002

There are a lot of things I can't do. You don't want me repairing your muffler, singing your aria or trying to take out the linebacker on a sweep around left end.

But I can open wine bottles. I have opened at least 100 of them in this millennium alone. So when I approached one in my kitchen as a party was beginning a few nights before Christmas, I grabbed the corkscrew without trepidation.

But have you ever had one of those bottles where the neck snaps off when you try to lift the cork out?

Of course you haven't because that's not supposed to happen!

It happened to me, though. I was using a levered corkscrew, which was a gift from a restaurant I liked right up until the moment I used its levered corkscrew. When I lifted the lever, the neck of the bottle tore off and my left thumb continued into the jagged glass.

As Martha Stewart would tell you, nothing makes an impression on arriving guests quite like a spurting artery.

Fortunately, my wife had taken the precaution of inviting a hand surgeon to this party. I kid you not. Chris Schmidt walked into the kitchen just as I was beginning to stain the sink a Christmas red.

"Is your thumb getting numb?" Schmidt asked.

"Yeah," I bravely whimpered.

"Let's go to the emergency room," said he.

Festive.

Schmidt, being your full-service surgeon, put me in his car and drove me to Allegheny General Hospital, only three-quarters of a mile from our house. He has privileges there that evidently include being able to walk in with a guy with a bloody dish towel wrapped around his hand, which is held above his head, and getting a table no questions asked.

Schmidt got me on a table, shot my hand up with anesthetics, then sewed it up. Four stitches. Then he asked if I wanted to take care of the severed nerve that night or go back to the party.

I've always said that severed nerves can wait. We were back at the party after only 90 minutes away.

At the party was Citizen Tom, a neighbor who never drinks anything without a head on it or an olive in it. He looked at my bandaged hand smugly. He'd always told me, "Wine is for girls."

There also were our neighbors Dan and Pat Rooney. I mention this only because, as I reached for a corkscrew to open a bottle of white wine, Dan asked if I should be doing that.

I replied, "Did Tommy Maddox hesitate before going back in?"

You can wait your whole life for set-up lines like that.

Anyway, the party went well. No more blood was spilled, though some Penn Pilsner was. A lawyer there advised me to save the evidence to sue the winemaker for a faulty bottle, but I know the winemaker, so I'm not about to go Ebenezer on him.

On Christmas Eve, I went back to the hospital with Schmidt to get the nerve reattached. He prescribed some painkillers that make my mind do funny things sometimes, but apart from the spiders and snakes emerging from my computer as I type this, they're no big deal. Oh, and the bandaged thumb sometimes makes it difficult to hit the space bar. But I'm mostlyhandlingthat.