Sunday 16 June 2024

Suture Removal Kit Model 24-7 by Nina Miller

Sterile/Latex Free

            Like the room in your doctor's clinic, the one used for procedures, the one with "good lighting," and the one you visit every few weeks.

Contents:

Alcohol Wipe

            The doctor examines you. Dark black sutures push up and out of the light brown skin of your forearm. Are they trying to escape or being rejected? Both could be the answer, you think, as alcohol is applied to your skin. Alcohol, which is at first cold and then stings, much like the words that come out of your partner's mouth with each completed cocktail.

Povidone-Iodine Prep

            The doctor rubs the pad gently along the jagged wound on your arm from the "cooking accident" that brought you to the ER last week. The yellow-brown liquid matched the healing bruises you've cleverly concealed under your eyes. Yet, you avoid their gaze as they make small talk. Just in case.

Tweezer

Scissors

4x4 inch gauze square

            Holding each suture by the knot, the doctor slips the scissors under it, severing the tie. If only your bonds unraveled, your binds severed, if only each day didn't feel like the tightening of a noose. You finger your wedding band as they snip each one until ten small broken pieces lie on the gauze. If only all your broken bits were this small and removable.

They return to you, gently rub in bacitracin, and bandage the raw skin, the puckered, jagged laceration with pinpoints of blood where the sutures once resided. They tell you there may be a scar. They don't know there are more deep inside.

The doctor asks if you're okay and if you need any pain medications. Slips a number into your hand and asks if you're safe, if they could help get you removed from the trauma you're embedded in.

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