Every time I’m cutting a bagel in half for Zoe for breakfast in the morning, I tell her that cutting bagels is one of the leading reasons people go to the ER with knife injuries.

“They hold the bagel in their hand, they start sawing at it with the serrated knife, something slips, and bam! They’re bleeding! So be careful with knives,” I like to tell her.

“I know, Dad, you told me last time,” she likes to tell me. “And you told me the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that. Can I just have my bagel?” Not much on the repetition of life lessons, my daughter.

So imagine her blackhearted glee when I turned up with a sliced-up hand of my own today. (Fear not — I’ve blurred out the ookie parts in the thumbnails so nobody gets too skeeved out. Click on ’em to see them full-size in all their gory glory.)

I wasn’t cutting a bagel, I was cutting a zip tie off a stupid new dog poop scooper Beth had just bought, but I was sawing at it with my folding pocket knife, and something slipped, and Bam! I was bleeding like a stuck pig. Nice.

I hemmed and hawed for a little while about whether or not it needed stitching, and Beth thought (and probably still thinks) I was an idiot for sitting down to Google “when does a wound need stitches” with a bloody paper towel wadded up in my hand. I thought about trying to Krazy Glue it shut myself, but I finally went to the local urgent care center to get it looked at. They put three stitches in it, but as you can see from the picture below they didn’t do much better than I could have out in the garage.

The doctor seemed really nervous, and I got the feeling it was me making him that way. He kept screwing up the knots in the stitches, and took multiple attempts — with multiple needle sticks — to put each stitch in. First he put in a stitch, then decided the thread was too thin and cut the stitch out, then started over again with thicker thread. He put three stitches in, then noticed the second one had torn loose while he was doing the third one and redid #2. The bottom stitch is so loose he almost could have skipped doing it. Overall, I think the end result looks like a 1st year mortuary student did it — with a hangover.

I wish I had Krazy Glued it myself. I couldn’t have done much worse, and it would have made for a much better story…