There was weird case where a wife got killed after falling on upturned knife in a cutlery basket as she was emptying out the dishwasher with her husband.  Yeah, sure, say most of us… he sure got away with a  tall story there… how the hell could someone be that unlucky and how coincidental that he was right there when it happened.  Well, I experienced my own version.

My husband Chris and I had unloaded the dishwasher.  We’d put away the glasses, the plates, even the cutlery and those big scary meat cleaver type knives that seem scary even laying n a sink.  And  it was time to start cooking together.  We were going to chop some vegetables.  Yes, pumpkin, you know, the thick chunky peel you need a heavy meat cleaver type of knife for.  One problem, I’m reasonably dyspraxic which means I can’t easily tell how my body is joined together or which way I’m facing in relation to my hands and arms or the objects in them.  But I’m also pretty manic… a rather scary combination.   And I tend to have a strange way of using my gaze.  I don’t track terribly well, I kind of scan things and the grab for them as I’ve turned away.

So combine all three and the fact that I’ve grabbed that meat cleaver thing using peripheral vision, swung around to face the pumpkin, and swung my hand around with the knife in it.  So what was in the way?  My neck.  Seriously, I could hardly believe it when I hit myself in the back of the neck with the blade of the meat cleaver.  And, even more crazily, I lived to tell the story.  It didn’t even draw blood, not a drop, must have been the wrong angle.

My husband was astounded to realise he’d almost witnessed his wife involuntarily chop herself in the back of the neck with a meat cleaver.  We had a chuckle saying how it’d look in court… no your honour, see it’s her fingerprints on the knife, I was just standing there…. yes… she chopped herself in the back of the neck.  So here I am nursing Generalised Anxiety Disorder, OCD and PTSD type crap which has me regularly envision the gazillion ways in which I’m surely going to be brutally killed (wasted intelligence if you ask me) and I hadn’t envisioned the most dangerous person I could meet was actually myself when I least expected it.  Now for that pumpkin soup.

Donna Williams *)

author, artist, composer, screenwriter

http://www.donnawilliams.net