I hurt myself at work today while fetching the mail. The way the mail works in our building is, either the postal carrier puts whatever you have in the little box assigned to you as a tenant, or he/she puts a key in your box with a tag on it, and that key opens one of the larger drawers that sits under the mailboxes for oversized envelopes and larger volumes of mail. Today was a large-volume day, so I found a yellow-tagged key in our mailbox, and I proceeded to open Drawer #25 below, as instructed by the tag.

Of course, even this drawer was slightly overstuffed, so when I inserted the key and tugged on the handle, #25 provided some resistance. Not one to give up, I reached my right hand into the drawer from the top and pulled.

OUCH.

The blood was flowing to the surface of my right index finger as I snatched it out of the drawer. I looked in to find the culprit: a very sharp, slightly hook-shaped curve that seemed to serve no function but was, nonetheless, melded to the rest of the lock mechanism. It was slightly rusted . . . but I wasn’t too concerned, as I was fairly certain that all my shots were up to date. So I grabbed the mail, dropped the Drawer #25 key into the drawer before sliding it back shut and headed upstairs before I bled all over the department’s mail (including my own, thank you very much). While I sorted through the mail, I nonchalantly called the doctor’s office to confirm the date of my last tetanus booster.

July 2000. And they’re only good for about 10 years.

Greeeeaaaat.

I consulted the family “doctors” (a.k.a. my husband and my mother, who never cease to have opinions about these things), who naturally recommended aggressive treatment. Doubting their ability to remain objective in the face of a 1-cm wide, 3mm-deep gash on my fingertip, I consulted Wikipedia. (Let’s be honest here: I use Wikipedia for everything.) The incubation period for tetanus, per The Source of All Sources, can be eight days to several months.

Holy moly.

So I could be fine today . . . and tomorrow . . . and even next week . . . and then like, six weeks from now, when I’m at Wrigley Field cussing out Zambrano, my jaw could lock up? No thanks.

So that was that. I called the doctor’s office back and told them I would be by in a couple of hours to get a tetanus booster.

My doctor’s office is just two miles from my office. But of course, thanks to the sheer genius of the City & County of Honolulu’s transportation people, I spent over an hour on the road, round trip. All for a tiny cut on my finger. All because the postal carrier overstuffed the freaking mail drawer. All because – what the hell was a sharp metal piece DOING in that drawer anyway.

But at least I can rest assured that, unless the vaccine is defective, my jaw won’t lock up on me while I play armchair manager at the Cubs games next month.