It happened all of a sudden that Ben flipped over on to the table and his left hand crushed on a thick wine glass, seriously horrible deep cut we all realized after a while. I blamed myself a little that it happened when he decided to turn and talk to me. I always quite convinced to myself by secret, that I kind of bring bad luck as things happened somehow related to me for so many times.

The blood was very dark in color and it looked almost fake, I thought it was just a spilt of some red wine. After Ben finished washing his wound and sit down on the sofa again, we wanted him to show us the cut. It was that time that freaked me out. That piece of flesh right below his thumb was almost dropping out, it looks horribly painful. I remember myself keep repeating the same words almost insanely:“You have to go to the hospital…”

We spent a good quarter of hour to discuss where is the nearest hospital and which is the quickest way to get there. I was almost losing my mind and being quite pushy to everyone to get going. Seiko was crying a little which made me (and Ben of course) quite sad as we were all there gathered together to celebrate her birthday.

The nightmare actually began in the A&E department of the hospital. Ben was still bleeding non-stop when we got there, yet the receptionist was taking her time to make registration. It annoyed us a lot that the registration’s attitude was as if there were no emergencies at all. When Ben finally got called by the nurse in less than 15 minutes, me and Yeji relieved a little and we slept while waiting. When Ben came out after quite some time we all thought he had been well taken care of but then he said he just got his wound cleaned and temporary wrapped to stop the blood... we then has been told that there were no doctors available to do the surgery. We didn’t expect the extremely long wait coming after that.

We’d been called to wait in the emergencies area together with Ben. We waited at least 2 hours until we had been called to wait in the resting room, where all the other patients lied down with some of their curtains pulled together. The nurse offered us some chairs to sit down but she can’t tell when the doctor is coming. We waited for another a few hours until breakfast time. They offered us cornflakes with milk, toasts with jams, tea and coffee. Ben, Yeji and I had the breakfast and felt slightly better. We were then waiting hopelessly again. Ben opened up the bandage to check the cut, I was feeling eerie to look at that. Ben asked us to take a picture of it, I was resisting in the beginning but then I thought why not, I did it (disappointedly the pictures blurred out).

We waited until lunch time. Ben were kindly offered sunday roast beef, Yeji and I were just getting some sandwiches. Yeji was funnily quite disappointed by that. We waited until the nurse herself felt ridiculous that she tried to grab a doctor by herself instead of letting us waiting endlessly. The doctor came by and the surgery took just around 15 minutes. And we were finally all freed after 12 hours wait in the hospital (12 f*cking hours).

Ben said the doctor was in shock when he knew we had waited over the night. Nobody knew we were waiting and usually patients waited 3 hours ‘only’ to get to see a doctor. Ben watched the whole process when the doctor lift up the cut to do anaesthesia injection and also the stitching process, he thought it would probably and hopefully be the first and last time to get to see that in life. I felt the pain only by imagining it.

To console ourself, Ben took us to Nandos for some delicious chicken and we were all good.

I am now about to take pictures of Ben’s healing wound after 2 months (yes it would take some time to fully heal I guess)