Super Glue Sister

Today was my sister’s birthday. I make the annual phone call. “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” I sing cheerily down the phone. “Is it?” she replied.  “YES! HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Did you do anything nice?” I continue with the optimistic tone, a lifelong habit. I live in hope that one day she will reply with an equally happy tone instead of the one that she has now had for forty-five years, which is one of gloom and disappointment. “No”, came her sullen response.

I sent her a subscription to a gardening magazine this year, something that I thought would appeal to her green fingers. “Did you get the magazine subscription?” I carried on, bulldozing my way through her concrete wall of negativity. “Yes. It doesn’t start until December. My birthday is now”.

Oh dear. This was probably the highlight of her disappointment that day. Inefficiency on my part for not planning it a month earlier so that the magazine arrived on her birthday rather than the letter telling her that next month she’d be getting the magazine.

I asked her again about her day. “I super-glued my finger to my eye”. Her nonchalant announcement caused me to yell an almighty “NO!” down the phone back at her. I can imagine myself in that situation and I’d have made it the number one topic of conversation if she had phoned me. I can’t help it, I love a bit of drama. That’s the difference between us. It is why she trained as a nurse and still works as one, whereas I trained as a nurse and retired six months later. I think that the dictionary definition is ‘incompetence’.

“WHAT HAPPENED?” I screamed, feeling nauseous and anticipating a surgical procedure. She told me the whole sticky story. “I was fixing something in the kitchen. I squeezed the tube and squirted a blob straight into my eye. I tried to get it out with my finger. You’d do that too, wouldn’t you? I shut my eye and then the glue sealed it completely shut. Then my finger got glued to my eyelid”. I let out another dramatic scream “NO!” She ignored my squeals. She’s been doing that for forty years.

“Did you phone an ambulance? The doctor? Your husband?” I asked. “What would they do?” she replied. I have no idea, but I’m sure that they would know better what to do than I would do in the same situation. I’d have panicked, phoned the emergency services and thrown myself headfirst into the ambulance. Upon arrival at the hospital, I’d be injected with a strong sedative, before being anaesthetised and sent to the operating theatre where a surgeon, waiting in gloves and gown, would get a scalpel and gently release my finger and eyelid from their gluey predicament.

“What did I do?” she seemed surprised that I couldn’t work it out myself. “I carried on with the housework”. That is the second difference between us. She is house-proud and loves housework. So much so that despite having a finger super-glued to her super-glued eyelids, she managed not only to put on a load of washing, but also to dust the front room and push the vacuum cleaner round the entire house. I am sure that she could well have prepared a three course meal for six and slipped in a bit of Irish Dancing too if asked.

“NO!” I continued with my theme of over excited responses, “How did you do that?” She paused. “It’s not hard. It’s only a finger glued to an eyelid. You can still do housework with one arm”. I disagreed. She was one armed and one eyed. She continued with her housework using her other left hand and left eye, which I can only imagine would have been awkward to say the least, especially the vacuum cleaning.

“I got tired after two hours”. Now that was unexpected. She can usually clean for a whole day before needing a rest. It must have been the glue fumes getting into her system. This may not have been the birthday news that I had been expecting to hear but it was far more interesting than the usual “We went for a meal” response from most other women I know.

“So I went to bed”. With her finger super-glued to her sealed eye she decided to take a nap. Again, yet another difference between us: I’d not be able to sleep worrying about blindness and brain damage as a result of unintentional glue sniffing. “I slept for two hour. Then I got up and my finger was not so stuck”. Great news. Now she was close to being well enough to open her birthday cards and even read them if she still had twenty-twenty vision intact.

“I slowly pulled off my finger”. She said that her eyelid stretched right out like an elastic band. “Was it sore?” I enquired. “A bit” came her reply. That’s difference between us number three: I’d have screamed blue murder and collapsed in a heap with the agony of it. I was feeling sick just imagining the skin being torn and the smell of the glue.

“I plucked out some eyelashes and it started opening”. A teenager would text OMG OMG OMG at this point. I felt sick and let out a final, stomach churning “NOOOO!” She carried plucking out eyelashes until the eye finally opened. “The majority of the glue was on the eyelashes. Do you understand that?” “YES!” Of course I did. Fully. I never buy super-glue and know that the same accident is virtually impossible with Pritt Stick.

Of course, I knew then what the ideal gift for her today would have been, and it wasn’t a subscription to a gardening magazine.  Whilst a magazine is a very practical sort of gift, I could have gone one better.  I could have given her a pair of extra long false eyelashes. She could have super-glued them on.