Wounded Traveler

The week has ended on an interesting note. I find that Munich is always surprising me. I am making the best of my time here but sometimes, I make really stupid decisions. Although, I’m unsure of why or how exactly it happened but sometime late Saturday night (or early Sunday morning, however you want to look at it) I stepped on a piece of broken glass and sliced my foot open so deep that I could see the subcutaneous fat under my skin. Jessica and I had been out in the city, enjoying Munich’s finest brews, and were on our way to the SBahn and were traveling through Munich’s pedestrian zone, somewhere between Marienplatz and Karlzplatz when I noticed the glass on the ground. My thought processes surrounding the event escape me – I wasn’t really that drunk anymore, most of the buzz had worn off somewhere between the McDonald’s chicken McNuggets and running through the Karlzplatz fountain. It was somewhere close to 4 am as we had been waiting for the trains to start running again so we were well exhausted and just wanted to go to her place to sleep. Unfortunately, the glass took the best of me and I ended up stepping on a piece of it and it sliced through my flip flop and cut right into my foot.

Blood. Everywhere. Gushing blood. It was gross. I was in shock so I hadn’t really registered what had happened at first which is the same sensation that happened when I cracked my shin on cement when I was 12 and a gaping puncture wound developed. It took me about a minute to realize that I was in serious shape and I had to sit down and find something to hold the pressure. I managed to find a German flag napkin in my purse (Danke, Deutschland!) but it didn’t hold much. I was a mess, I could literally see the blood pulsing out of my foot through this huge gash. But strangely enough, it didn’t hurt at all. Jessica was in a state of panic and ran off to see if she could somewhere with napkins or paper towels… anything, and I just kind of sat on the street, holding my bleeding foot with my bloody hands. It was like a battle zone. Really gross.

Fortunately, some nice German people came by and they had a pack of Kleenex and a sense of hospitality and stopped to helped. One of the guys went off to find a taxi and I just kept putting pressure on my foot. Eventually, it stopped bleeding, the taxi came, and Jessica and I were on our way to the klinikum, or hospital. He ended up driving us to two different ones because the first one was closed. But he was very nice and only charged us a 6,50 EUR fare for the ride to the first hospital. Inside the hospital it was a bit of a pain – I don’t speak German very well and the nurses didn’t know very much English but fortunately, the doctor was fluent. They stitched me up (then it started hurting!) and sent me off with the promise of a bill to the house. Fortunately, I have au pair insurance for ‘accidents’ so it will cover the costs.

I got home around 6 am and so far, I’ve spent my Sunday in bed sleeping on and off for six or seven hours, reading my book, watching Everwood on DVD, and took a long, hot bath (keeping my foot out of the water). Which is too bad because all of my friends here in Munich went to the Englischer Gartens today but there is no way I could manage to walk around. Hopefully it will get better in the next few days. But next up is explaining  the situation to my host mom and telling her that I’ll need her to take me the family doctor next week to get the stitches removed.

Ah, anyway. Here’s a picture of my gruesome wound. Not for the faint of heart!

What I’ve been doing all day.