Maggie and the Zombie Hands
This, my friends, is a scary, true-life, just in time for Halloween, Zombie story.
It ain’t gonna be funny.
A few days ago, while at work, I had just washed my hands and stuck them under the air dryer. Rubbing my hands back and forth to dry them I looked down and thought, “What the hey, my hands look blue.”
I raised my hands to my face for a closer peak. I turned them over, back and forth, “Are they blue? Is it the lighting in here?”
I wasn’t sure, but I’d just washed them, they weren’t cold, what else could it be? Had to be the lighting. I stepped out of the bathroom and quickly became distracted, forgetting all about my hands.
Until just last night…after I changed into my pj’s and was getting ready to settle in for the night, I caught another glimpse of my hands. They looked bluish. A closer inspection revealed they were, indeed, blueish-grayish, on the palms, on the back side, around the finger nail. An even, blue gray tint (heavy on the creepy gray color) that looked slightly modeled and certainly not healthy.
I quickly stuck my hands in the sink and gave them a wash with a dab of hand soap and some hot water. Maybe they were cold and I hadn’t noticed? I dried them. No change.
So I went to my husband, “Do my hands look odd to you?” I asked.
He squinted at my hands, “What? Do your hands look… Oh. Gray. Blue? What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just washed them. They still look like this. I’m kind of freaked out.”
He pulled my hands closer to his faced. Turned them over, back and forth.
“They’re like…blueish grayish…” he said. “They look…” his voice trailed off.
“Dead?” I offered.
“Well, I mean, obviously they aren’t!” he quickly replied, “But they don’t look right. Are you cold? Do they hurt in anyway?” He quizzed as he poked and pushed at my hands.
“They feel fine,” I said, “I feel fine. But this isn’t right.”
“No…let me see your feet,” he said.
“Do you think my oxygen levels are low?” I asked. He looked at my feet. Normal. Alive. Back to my hands he goes.
“You did complain you couldn’t breath yesterday…” he said. And it was true, I had complained of that. I was getting short of breath talking on the phone. It hadn’t really worried me, I’ve had bronchitis recently and it appears to be a trend that nasty colds or sinus infections find their way to my chest these days. I chalked it up to that. Figured if it got worse, I’d bust out my inhaler. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I really wasn’t getting enough air!
Now you need to know something about me, and something about my husband:
I am dramatic. Always. It’s my default.
He is not. Ever. I’m not sure he knows how to be. (Except for this one night in college when he spilled beer on his cell phone and you would have thought it was the apocalypse. But other than that…) He doesn’t rile. He never reveals when he is actually worried about something. He’s that guy who shows up after you’ve just been attacked by a dinosaur and tells you that despite the bone protruding from your thigh, it really doesn’t look that bad. It’s going to be just fine.
But I could tell, he was worried. He kept looking at my hands, asking me questions about my health, then looking at them again.
Something wasn’t right and he knew it and I knew it.
“Are my hands dead?” I asked him.
“No…” he said. “But you’re right, something isn’t right and I think we better figure it out.”
Oh hell.
At this point I started to get actually, truly worried about what was going on as I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at my blue-gray hands. My husband got up and said he was going to “look something up” and I should just stay there.
“What?! Like on WebMD? Are you going to google blue hands? You know its going to tell you that I have AIDS, Lupus and Leukemia right? That’s what it always says!”
“No! I’m not going to WebMD it,” he said. That worried me even more! Because that meant he was either looking up directions to the ER or consulting one of his 15 Anatomy and Physiology books to determine which part of my body was failing me. Both were likely, he rarely knows how to get places : )
“Well you go look up whatever you want. I’m going to try to wash them again!” I hollered to him.
“You already washed them!”
“It’s worth a try!”
“What do you think you handled that turned both sides of your hands an even blue-gray?”
“That pan I used to cook dinner had a black handle. Maybe it rubbed off.”
“On both sides of both of your hands? And I used it too, my hands are fine.”
“I’m going to wash my hands!” I insisted, trying not to cry and already wondering if Canon makes any kind of camera that doesn’t require hands.
“Wash them one more time, but then we’re going to the emergency room, okay?” my husband said in that calm, I-think-your-hands-have-died voice.
I hesitated. Who wants to do that on a Wednesday night? But I looked at my hands and thought once again, “Son of a bitch, those are a dead person’s hands!!” so I replied, “Okay, get ready, I’ll wash them again.”
This time I doubled up – a squeeze of dish soap, a pump of hand soap with the little micro scrubby bead thingys (instead of the foaming hand soap I’d tried earlier).
I turned on the hot water.
I lathered.
I stuck my hands under some water.
I lathered some more.
And slowly…
The soap turned blue.
“The soap is blue!!! The soap is blue!!!” I began to shout! My husband raced down the stairs, grabbed my soapy hands and looked from himself.
“Holy shit it is! It’s like, really blue. Make sure it’s coming off.”
I rinsed real good and what do you know, living hands again!
My husband breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
“What the -expletive- was that?! That scared the -expletive- -expletive- out of me! I thought your oxygen levels had dropped! I thought something was very very wrong! What the -expletive- was that??”
“I dunno.” I said.
He stared at me.
“Well think about it. What did you handle that was blue?”
“I dunno,” I said. “I’d only been thinking about what I handled that was black or gray or something, it looked more black or gray.”
“It was something blue,” he said.
“I dunno,” I said. I leaned back on the counter and I thought… what had I handled that was blue. I thought back to work. Meetings, phone calls, I’d cleaned out several files….none of them blue.
“Oh.” I said, finally. “It was the dye in my new dark wash skinny jeans.” I said. “I was excited about ’em…didn’t bother washing them before I wore them.”
My husband stared at my in disbelieve. He was not prepared to admit that he had nearly rushed me to the emergency room over skinny jeans. He slowly climbed the stairs to our bedroom, took my new skinny jeans out of my closet (oh please, don’t act like you wash your jeans every time you were them), and rubbed his palms over them roughly. He turned his hand palm up. Dead. Another dead hand.
“Well,” he said to me. “I’m glad your hands didn’t die.”
“You’ve got to stop being so dramatic,” I said. “You’ve been watching way too much Walking Dead.”
And that is the story of Maggie and the Zombie Hands.
Alternatively titled Maggie and the Skinny Jeans of Death.
Alternatively titled That Time I Almost Paid a $200 ER Co-Pay Because of My Skinny Jeans.
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