So, I am now moved into the house where I will be living for the next year. Boy, moving is really stressful and always a lot more trouble than I remember it…

My dad drove up last Friday morning and the first thing we did was go to get my new bed. While loading the bed pieces into the van, my dad sliced open the flap of skin between his pinky and ring fingers. While only skin (no muscle, tendons, etc) was damaged, it looked horrible and I was convinced that he needed stitches. Of course, he refused to go to the hospital because “we don’t have time – there’s too much to do”. Whatever! It’s also pretty important not to permanently damage your hand or get a raging infection… We settled on him cleaning it out in the washroom and bandaging it up tight for the rest of the day.

While very beautiful, this bed was SO hard to put together! Way too many screws, plugs, and other fiddly things, plus I had to figure out how to get a slipcover on this thing at the end, when I had long past stopped caring that everything fit together perfectly. At the end of all this, we had one screw (!) and a metal piece (?) left. Where were those supposed to go? Maybe we would have known if the instructions consisted of more than just vague drawings… We decided that there was so much other stuff holding this bed together, it didn’t need the screw and the metal bit… Right?

Then I had to pick up the rest of my furniture from my ex-boyfriend’s house. It was great that he was there to help us get it all loaded faster, but also hard for me to see him. I don’t even know what upset me so much, it was just hard to see him again and I was already super stressed by all the moving stuff.

After dinner (12 hours after the injury occurred), we did end up at the emergency room so my dad could find out if he did indeed need stitches. Now, at least in Canada, we are used to hearing all about long wait times for medical care, especially in the emergency room. This has been discussed at all levels of government in recent elections and everyone seems to have a plan to reduce wait times. But who really expects that politicians can really do anything about that? So, we still expected to wait a LONG time (eg: 3-4 hours) for my dad to be taken care of, since his issue wasn’t really an EMERGENCY, just urgent. However, to our surprise he was seen by a triage nurse only 30 minutes after we arrived and given a tetanus shot, his hand cleaned and taped up, and out of there within an hour. I was truly amazed by this speed and incredibly impressed by how courteous, patient, and efficient the nurses and doctors were.

The next day I moved my stuff out of residence and then we just unpacked and drove around to get groceries before my dad headed home. I’m so glad to be back in a real house, with a kitchen and bathroom that I don’t have to share with 20 other people! Hopefully I won’t have to move again for a long, long time.