I wasn't always this sane

(Oh, the places I could go with a title like that...)
Turns out, I'm going somewhere really gross. Don't read this if you're faint of heart, or don't like pain. I warned you.

When you grow up in a neighborhood like mine, it tends to be stressful; and stress does weird things to people. Stress takes whatever little idiosyncrasies one has and turns them into full blown wrongness.
One of my idiosyncrasies is how I hate my body. Not my whole body, just one little piece of it at a time. For a while, I hated my nose. It was too cute. It ended in a little round ball. It was covered in freckles. (um, yeah. Redhead=freckles.) One month my legs would be too skinny, the next my skin would be too pale. You know, standard body dismorphic stuff. I never did anything stupid about it, just grumbled into the mirror when I thought nobody was looking.
That is, I never did anything stupid until I started hating my hair. One day, I'll post a picture of my hair, and you'll understand. But until I get around to that, you'll have to accept a description instead.
My hair is thick and curly and orange. It wouldn't feather, like Farrah Fawcetts. It wouldn't spike, like Cyndi Laupers. It had a mind of it's own, and all it wanted to do was puff.
One day I got sick of looking at my bushy orange hair, so I decided to cut it. This was shortly after I had liberally doused my hair with Sun-In, and learned that peroxide turns red hair day-glo orange. I didn't have the money for a hair cut, so I got the scissors out and started chopping at it myself. I was upset at the neon effect, I was on my period, and I was crying. What with all the internal chaos, I cut rather sloppily, and accidentally snipped off the very tip of my ring finger.
(I'll wait while you cringe in horror)
.
.
.
You can't really tell. It was just a few millimeters of skin, and I didn't actually cut it all the way through. It still had a tiny bit that was connected, so when I realized what I had stupidly just done, and ran cold water over it, the bit of skin flapped around.
I stopped running water over my finger, because that was just creepy. Then it started to hurt, and my god, the pain was unlike anything I could remember. I knew I needed stitches, but I also knew what mom would say.
"You don't need stitches. We'll sit in the emergency room all day waiting, and those doctors should be seeing people who need them."
So I grabbed a band-aid and tried to stick the flap of skin back on. This was a miserable failure, of course. The band-aid would slip around, pulling the skin with it. It hurt like crazy, and was freaky too. I tried using 3 band-aids instead, One to hold the flap, and 2 to hold the flap holding band-aid. I promptly bled through all of them.
I went and showed my finger to my sister, hoping for some moral support, or maybe just a way to fix it. Her help came in the form of a question, "What did you go and do that for?" Then she rolled her eyes like I had done it for the attention.
We had some gauze and paper tape, so I wrapped my finger in gauze and made a little cast for it out of the tape. That worked pretty well. The finger bit still hurt so badly I wanted to just stop feeling anything, but the mini cast protected it from being jarred. Unfortunately, my little protective device wasn't breathable. My finger started to sweat, then it got all pruny. After a few days of incarceration, it started to smell like feet.
I decided to let it breathe several times a day, because bactine just wasn't killing the awful smell. In hindsight, letting it breathe probably saved me from the joys of gangrene. That might have been my only bright moment that week.
I kept expecting the little flap of skin to turn black and fall off. Like an umbilical cord, or my sister's fingernail when she got her hand caught in the escalator. But it didn't turn black. It knitted itself back to my finger. It's kind of funny, I have a little 3mmx5mm oval of skin, complete with fingerprint lines, surrounded by scar tissue. I don't have much feeling in that bit of skin. I can feel pressure and pain, but not heat or cold. I used to freak out my friends by poking it with a needle, pretending that it didn't hurt. (Lord knows why. Stupid teenager tricks, perhaps?) When I think about it, (or write about it, like here) the fingertip tingles.

The moral of the story:
Don't let your kids stay home alone. They will do stupid things and not tell you about them.