Six more weeks of winter and my goal was not to get injured. It was a typical Sunday. I got up, showered got dressed and went to church. After church, I went home and got changed and went with some friends to go watch the super bowl.  While at my buddies house we were outside helping with the farm chores. After the chores we had a snow ball fight and we were just messing around in the snow. That whole time I did not fall once! I was thinking to myself this is going to be a good day. We were getting pretty cold so we went inside to get warmed up and get some dinner. After the game I was leaving to go home and I slipped on the ice and caught my self with my right hand. I fell hard! It felt like a broke my wrist. While driving home I could not even rest my hand on the steering wheel because anything that touched it hurt like heck. By the time I got home (which was a five minute drive) it was pretty swollen and very very painful. For those of you who use the one  to ten pain number scale with ten being the worst pain you ever felt in your life, my wrist was about an eight. I was even having trouble untying my shoes because the pain and the swelling were already in to my pinky and ring finger. Have you ever had the type of bleed where it hurts to move it but it hurts even worse to rest it? That’s how it was feeling, and I knew I had to get factor. I got all of my supplies out and mixed it and was getting ready to stick myself. I did not want to put the tourniquet on my right are because I did not want to help along the swelling of my hand. I could not hold the butterfly needle with my right hand due to the pain. So I asked my mom to infuse me and she did a mighty fine job. My dad got me an ice pack and an Ace ™ wrap. That evening was one of the longest nights I have had in a while. I stayed up until about three thirty in the morning because I could not sleep because it just hurt and it kept me up. I finally fell asleep because I was just so exhausted.  I took some Tylenol™ and it did not help at all. I did not want to take anything else because I knew if I took anything else I would not be able to wake up at seven thirty in the morning for my eight thirty class. When I woke up in the morning it was awesome because my hand was not swollen and it did not hurt at all. I knew just because it was not painful it did not mean the bleed was one hundred percent resolved. So I factored before I left for class.

This is one example of a bleed that could have ended up bad but did not because of my quick thinking. We all have times where we do not want to infuse right away, or we just want to wait it out or we even trick our selves some time to think that it might heal its self. At least I have though that a couple times. We all know our bodies, and we all know when we should infuse. We will also learn from our mistakes. If I had waited till the morning to factor it could have swollen even more and I would have been in a lot more pain and I would have missed school. I have learned through out the years to pay attention to the warning signs that my body gives about bleed. When I get those warning signs I know that I need to factor promptly or I may be treating a bleed for a couple days or even weeks.