The 9 am call came, but it was not the one I was expecting.
I was waiting for the moving company to let me know the men I hired to lift heavy furniture were on their way. Instead, they called to tell me they were cancelling.
"But we can come on Monday. Will that work?"
Will that work? I had six people waiting to help me unpack thousands of skeins of yarn into the furniture that they were supposed to bring from the old location to the new one. No, Monday would not work. I needed the furniture now. Apparently it was up to my friend, her husband, and me to make this happen - a scenario I tried to avoid by booking the moving company two months in advance.
My friend and I kicked off this adventure with a cabinet, wrestling the heavy piece of furniture out of the back of her SUV. It was awkward, but between the two of us, we'd figured out a system that was actually working...right up until a curb decided to crash the party, uninvited.
It turns out giant concrete slabs don't move out of your way. Who knew? My foot figured that out immediately, and gravity enthusiastically took it from there. My hands were trapped underneath the cabinet, leaving me with absolutely no way to protect myself in the instant I went from vertical to horizontal.
My body hit everything but the lottery.
My face stopped the fall. More specifically, my nose. Blood poured onto the white cabinet, creating a Tracy/Jackson Pollock collaboration. Sotheby's might've been interested in the statement piece, assuming the CDC didn’t claim the original artwork first.
I somehow pried my hands out from between the furniture and the concrete parking curb, and stood up - completely shell-shocked. You know how cartoons have little birds circling someone's head after an anvil falls on them? That was me - except I now had to unpack inventory instead of lying on the ground with a bouquet of flowers in my hands.
My broken finger immediately turned a deep aubergine - like a furious eggplant.
My nose was also broken, and had a huge gash across it.
My lip looked as if I thought getting Botox in the back of a van was a solid, life choice.
Both my knees were skinned and bloody - like I was an 8 year old that had crashed my bike.
A bruise the size of Egypt blossomed across my arm; a lovely arm cuff in the color of death.
At this point, I looked less like a yarn store owner, and more like I'd spent the morning making questionable decisions in a basement at someone’s Fight Club meeting.
Oddly enough, all I really remember from that moment was worrying that my favorite pair of sunglasses had gotten smashed in this goat rodeo. Which, thankfully, was the only thing on my body that wasn’t pulverized. At this point my friend must have taken over, because the next thing I remember, I was sitting on the couch with ice on both my nose and my finger.
At some point the unpacking crew arrived and were trying their hardest to convince me to go to the emergency room to have a professional check out my yard sale of injuries. However, a few weeks earlier, I had surgery to remove a large benign tumor. On the drive home from the procedure, I began hemorrhaging and ended up spending hours back in the ER where they did absolutely nothing except stab me for various tubes of blood and bill me a ludicrous amount of money.
I was not going back.
Besides, what were they going to do? Make me sit in a germ-infested waiting room for six hours before telling me to ice it, take ibuprofen, and rest? I had already pinched the cartilage back into what I hoped was a straight line, using all of my expert medical training I learned watching House to perform this procedure.
Another friend was on her way to help and texted to ask if I needed anything. She probably meant a box cutter. Maybe some packing tape.
"Band-Aids," I replied.
Because she's known me for years, her response was immediate:
"Well... that doesn't sound good." She showed up with an entire first aid kit, the majority of which was immediately used to prevent me from having to knit an alpaca straight jacket to hold my shattered body together.
The ladies unpacked eleventy-five million skeins of yarn. They took turns making sure I wasn't concussed, handing me fresh ice packs, and trying, unsuccessfully, to convince me to go to the emergency room. My friend's husband quietly kept hauling the heavy furniture over from the old shop, hanging things, doing stuff that I couldn’t remember I needed to have done. Things found their way out of boxes and onto shelves. Everything came together, I think? Honestly, that day is mostly a blur and even now, I’m still kind of swirling.
Should I have gone to the emergency room? Probably. My crooked, still swollen finger is a permanent reminder of my awesome decision making skills. My nose now has a scar across the middle, and my upper lip has a little more bad attitude than it used to.
I asked if this disaster would ever be funny.
My friends said yes.
Looking back, they weren't completely wrong. It’s almost humorous now - as my wounds slowly show themselves to the door. My upper lip, however, remains unconvinced, as the permanent “Oh my gawd, are you serious” look seems to indicate.
Also, for the record, I still maintain that losing a fight to a cabinet does not count as me joining Fight Club, because it totally doesn’t exist.
Tracy Winslow is currently a hot mess. As soon as she figures out where she packed her will to live, she hopes to extinguish the flaming dumpster fire that is her current life and get back to doing what she does best. Which, it turns out, is not bare-knuckle boxing cabinets. Come see the new Low Country Shrimp and Knits at 10 Kitties Landing Road, Suite G in Bluffton. And while you're here, treat yourself to a coffee and a sweet treat from One More Row Coffee Co., now open inside the shop!