Ow! Ow! Ow!

 

The highlight of the week, the thing that stands out most this week, is my handsome mountain man getting hurt.

          “What happened?!” I know you wanna know.

          Mike’s new front end-mower. When it was delivered, it was delivered with the snowblower attached. Mike went down to the barn to take off the blower and put the mower on.

          My phone rang. “Can you come down and help me?” Mike asked. “I can’t get the mower on by myself.”

          I went down to the barn.

“It has a quick disconnect,” Mike said. “You get on that side and I’ll get on this side and let’s see if we can line it up.”

We tried to line things up, and there are two openings on the backside of the mower deck, but no matter what we did there was no way things would line up to hook up. After about ten minutes, I stopped to look things over. The snowblower and broom have a bracket for the disconnect to slide into.

I got down and looked under the mower. Even if we lined it up so the disconnect slide into one of the openings, the blades would hit it. “There’s no way you can use the quick disconnect with the mower. There’s no place for it to go. It has to come off.”

Without knowing how the quick disconnect is attached, it looked like it couldn’t be removed.

          “Maybe we have the wrong mower deck?” I questioned.

          A quick call to the dealer assured us it was the correct mower.

          Like Poppy used to say, “If all else fails, read the directions.”

          “Where’s the book?” I asked.

          That required a trip back up to the house, but back up to the house we went. We found the booklet on the quick disconnect and once we saw how it was installed, it was easy enough to get off.

          But—

          We still had a problem. We couldn’t get the arms to come up high enough to line up with the pins.

          “Do you think they had to lower the mower deck?” I asked. That’s just me trying to figure out a solution to the problem. Mike should’ve said, “Peg, that doesn’t make any sense. If we can’t raise the arms the mower will always be too low.” Yeah. That’s what he should’ve said. Hindsight is wonderful, isn’t it. With hindsight you get to skip all the rigamarole it took to reach the final answer — and sometimes that would’ve been a whole lot less painful!

          The wheels on the back of the mower had pins holding them. Mike got down on his hands and knees and pulled the pin on one side. The mower dropped down. The added pressure or twist made the other side more stubborn. Mike used something to knock the pin out and as soon as it cleared, the wheel flipped out, the mower deck dropped down with a thud and I hear a quiet, “OwOwOwOwOwOw,” from Mike. He didn’t yell, he didn’t cuss. Somehow that was more frightening.

          It only took me a second to grasp the situation. His fingers were pinched between the sharp steel edge of the mower deck and the hard, cold, concrete floor.

          “Then Peg said, ‘Wait a minute while I run up to the house and get my camera.’” That’s Mike’s version of the story. He likes to put his own spin on things, don’cha know. In some worlds that does happen. People are more intent on taking a video then in helping.

          I looked around and grabbed the first thing my eyes landed on, wedged it under the mower, and lifted it up enough that Mike could get his fingers out. I don’t know now what it was that I used. A hammer? A wrench? I was only focused on getting it off him.

          “It’s gonna bleed,” Mike says getting up off the floor.

          (Mixing tenses always makes my editor’s left eye twitch.)

          Mike’s long legs took him halfway to the house before I could say, “Let me see.” He was right, it not only was going to bleed, it was bleeding.

I hurried ahead of him to open doors and I was halfway to the bathroom when I realized Mike wasn’t behind me anymore.

“Where did he go?” you ask.

          The kitchen sink.

          “I think I dripped blood on the carpet,” he said putting his hand over the sink.

          Now I did think about taking a picture. “Can I take a picture?” I asked.

          Mike has long since resigned himself to living with a writer who documents the events in her life with photographs. Even hurting as much as he must’ve been hurting, he allowed me to be me. “Hurry up,” he said.

          It would take too long to track down my camera. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and took a picture.

         Then I cleaned the dishrag and breakfast dishes from the bottom of the sink and turned the water on. The stream was too hard and it hurt his tender fingers. I quickly adjusted the flow.

          “Get some Band-Aids,” Mike said even as I was on my way.

          Because I didn’t take any picture to remind me of the timeline, I’m not sure when we went back down to work on the mower problem some more. But this I do know. At some point I was looking and saw blocks that were keeping the arms from raising high enough to attach the mower.

          Aye-yi-yi.

          I took the blocks out and the arms went up. From there it wasn’t all that hard to get the mower hooked up. But now we have a different problem.

          “What now?” you ask.

          Now the hydraulics don’t work. They worked before. Mike had to raise the snowblower to take it off the trailer and put it in the barn.

          Anxious to try the new mower, Mike mowed with it anyway. It cut the grass too short so he didn’t mow very long.

          We made a trip to the Kubota dealer and Mike was able to talk to a mechanic. They couldn’t figure out what the problem may be so we have a mechanic coming on Tuesday morning to look at it.

          I took another picture of Mike’s fingers a couple of days later when we were changing his Band-Aids.

          I’ve mentioned this before, but I want to tell you again. When I see — or even think about — someone getting hurt, I get a zap in my knees. It feels like a quick jolt of electricity.

There’s a name for this kind of thing: somatic empathy, or a vicarious pain response. My body reacts physically, suddenly, and sharply when I see, imagine, or even anticipate someone else getting hurt.

          I don’t know when it first started happening to me, but I do know why it happens. I’m empathetic. I care. Deeply care. I’m not alone in this. Other people experience it, too, but they might feel it in different places — hands, stomach, chest — but for me, my knees are where my body keeps that wiring.

          The whole way from the barn to the house — washing Mike’s wound, getting it bandaged — my knees were having a meltdown. I’ve never before had such a long session of knee zapping and it was getting pretty uncomfortable for me, although I’m sure it pales in comparison to what Mike was feeling.

          And that’s the big news of the week.