An emergency maritime surgery

Teaching has it's drawbacks, mainly the workload to pay ratio, and having no bathroom breaks all day. But there's some upsides, too. Field trips.

Today we got to go on a boat around the Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

It was my favorite type of field trip, run by people who actually know how to deal with children and have age appropriate activities for them, and also in a contained area where I don't have to count kids every 30 seconds to calm my own anxiety. This meant I was basically there as eye candy and just got to sit around and take pictures. It's too bad I can't post them on the internet because they got to sail the boat and it was really cute.

The trip was not without pain and trauma. I was blissfully eating my lunch in the sunlight, enjoying the view, when I reached for something and scratched my finger. It left a long black mark, and tried to wipe it off.

Lo and behold, it was not a mark, it was a GIANT SPLINTER.

Here's a really anticlimactic picture. I wanted to impress people with my injury, like always, but it's hard to take a picture on a boat in direct sunlight during a panic attack. But rest assured, the captain and first mate were both impressed and shocked by the length of the wood embedded in my finger.

You can see the blood, and then the long black mark across my whole knuckle.

They got me tweezers and I tried unsuccessfully for awhile to extract it with my non dominant hand. Then I enjoyed a really awkward fifteen minutes or so of holding hands with the young, not hard on the eyes first mate while he performed a very painful splinter tweezer surgery. I stayed very strong and didn't cry. My mantra was that I would "soon" have to endure childbirth and rumors consistently indicate that consists of pain worse than a random sailor using questionable tweezers to remove a splinter while at sea.

Speaking of, I think I officially have a bump that probably looks like a beer belly to strangers, but we know the truth.

That time I decided to run outside this week. FAIL.

I even pushed through the pain and attended boot camp after school (and I did 30 minutes on the exercise bike this morning). #sobrave

I had my second panic attack of the day when the school nurse advised getting a tetanus shot, because if there's one thing I hate more than random men picking at my skin with sharp tools, or even dogs, it's needles. But I called my doctor and apparently I had one this past August! I love it when things just work out.

Further accomplishments this week include buying this yesterday (despite a random woman in the store warning me not to) and still having some in the bag when I got to bed tonight. It hasn't happened yet but I'm generally too tired to even eat chocolate past 8pm.

 

I'm hopeful I'll make it through work tomorrow - spring break begins at 3:30.
Saturday I'm doing a 10k that will probably take two hours, and then we are headed to Connecticut to visit former famous blogger Kari!

What's the best and worst part of your job?