The Mexican Finger

Husband has espinas in his finger. I know too well that these invisible cactus thorns that lurk in the landscaping bark mulch can turn into a nasty infection. No matter how he rubs and tweezes, he can’t get them out.

Scrape it off with an emery board, I suggest. He snorts. Then he thinks of my Mexican finger.

“Remember the espinas in Oaxaca?” he asks, rubbing his knuckle. “That surgeon?”

It was a while ago when I had tossed a few dried cholla cactus stems into the Santa Fe kindling pile. Something pricked my finger but I was too preoccupied with our trip to Mexico to pay attention. By the time we finally got to Oaxaca, that finger was hot and throbbing. Although I could see tiny red dots I couldn’t squeeze or tweeze or even suck them out. It is no vacation walking old, historic streets with your finger on fire.

The B&B sent me to a doctor down the street. Gee, uh, a foreign doctor. The sparse examining room was immaculate, containing a worn examining table and a glass-fronted cabinet holding a few tongue depressors, bandages and a few instruments. The handsome, white-coated doctor peered at my wounded finger and shook his head.

“It’s too swollen now to see the thorns.” He reached into his dispensary and handed me a bottle of meds. “Take this penicillin for three days to reduce the swelling, then go see my surgeon colleague at his hospital. I’ll call him for you.” He scribbled a name and address.

His fee was seven dollars

Surgery in a foreign hospital? Yes, I’m a cool traveler, or I thought I was, but the thought of an emergency room crowded with wailing babies and an crowd of sickly people whose language I couldn’t understand—in spite of all those futile Spanish lessons I’d taken—did I really need to see a surgeon for cactus prickers?

On day three of the penicillin the swelling was down but not completely gone so Husband and I went off to find the foreign hospital somewhere across the foreign city. Oaxaca spreads business districts all across its rolling valley with the fabulous ruins of Monte Albon on a distant rise.

All the buildings in this section of the city looked like ordinary three story apartments with garage doors than opened onto the street. Nothing said Hospital, nor was there any sign. After circling the block, we finally decided that building number beside an open garage must be correct.

Husband went to park. An old but clean ambulance stood inside the bay, then an ordinary door opened into a lovely three story atrium with a black and white tiled floor, rather like a hotel lobby. A few benches and big potted palms lined one wall. I was the only visitor.

As I gazed around to see where I should go, a handsome woman working at a desk on the far side looked up and called across the echoing floor, “Digame!” I looked at her blankly.

“Digame!” she shouted again but not unkindly. In a heavenly epiphany I suddenly understood what she was saying and that this foreign word would stay with me for the rest of my life: Talk to me.

So she was the receptionist, very classy indeed. When I stumbled through my clumsy Spanish pregunta she pointed to a bench and picked up her phone. In two minutes an even more handsome Mexican man opened a door, introduced himself as the surgeon and gestured me in.

He clucked sympathetically at my finger and asked where I’d got the espinas.

“Santa Fe, Nueva Mexico, I know it”, he said. “I like to ski the Rockies.”

My God, he was gorgeous, with smooth mahogany skin, thick shiny black hair and a matching mustache. He held my purpled finger in perfectly formed hands with manicured nails, numbed me up and pulled each cactus thorn out.

“Twenty-five,” he reported triumphantly when he lay the tweezers down. “That's a record, I think. Although it happens all the time, especially riding. Do you ride?” he asked in perfect English.

I nodded as he bound up my finger. “Try to avoid the cholla.”

Absolutely, Doctor. From now on, someone else can stack the firewood. I shall wear gloves night and day and learn what damned cholla cactus looks like.

His fee was twenty-five dollars, a buck apiece.

But that was then. Here in the U.S. the Husband could schlep his finger to our local clinic. Medicare would pay for it. But the clinic's fifteen minutes away and a long wait. First, the emery board.

How’s the finger, I asked him later in a moment of wifely tenderness, remembering how mine festered.

“Oh, the emery board pulled it right out,” he said.

Now, if we could just figure out how cholla espinas get into pine bark mulch. Suggestions?