Blood Flows at 92 East

As you can see from this photo, I've been in the process of completely gutting and re-doing our old spare bedroom in preparation for the arrival of Baby-boy Henderson. This is a shot of the exposed 107 year old lath which was under the plaster which was under several layers of odd wallpaper, which was under some shoddy painted paneling and a horrendous dropped ceiling. Anyway, things got a little dodgy tonight around 10:30pm when I was climbing down from my ladder and stepped directly onto an old ribbed lath nail which went through my tennis shoe and lodged firmly about one-half inch into my big toe. I bellowed out a Homer Simpson-esque "AAAARRGGH" and immediately tried to pull my shoe off but quickly realized this was impossible as long as the rest of the nail was still sticking out of my shoe. I cried out in pain a few more times while I hobbled to the door where my large pregnant wife met me, having been alerted to my distress by my continual howling. Rachel asked me what was wrong, but all I could manage was to motion to a nearby set of pliers and grunt "Pull it out! Do it fast!" while I held up my damaged foot. Rachel, never a squemish woman by nature, immediately grasped my predicament and without hesitation grabbed the pliers and ripped the nail out of my foot and shoe with a single, bold yank. I quickly had the shoe off and began to squirt blood on my kitchen floor until Rachel came dashing back with some alchohol, Neosporin and bandaids. After we got the bleeding stopped, I made a quick call to my Dad for a medical consultation, who reminded me that this wasn't the first time I had managed to get a nail imbedded in my body (thanks Dad) and maybe I should check on how current was my Tetanus shot. After he responded ambiguously a number of times to questions like "C'mon Dad, what are the chances that I would actually Lockjaw from this thing?" and "Every old nail can't be infected with tetanus, can it?", I felt confident I could skip a trip to Prime Care and the resulting co-pay. Within a few minutes I strapped on some work boots (maybe I should have been wearing these to begin with) and got back to work. I'll post some more photos of the room as it progresses. Hopefully this will be the only injury report. My toe is still throbbing. This is much more painful than when I shot myself in the hand with a framing nail gun.