No Exceptions

I walked into our bathroom to see Steve holding his hand over his sink to allow blood to flow down the drain.

Yes, flow.

“Sweetie! What did you do?” I leaped across the room to assess the damage.

“I think I cut my finger on an oil filter,” says The Hubster, who seemed a bit unsteady on his feet. Since he is half a foot taller and outweighs me by fifty pounds, I wonder if I can catch him if he passes out.

Seeing the enormous gash on his index finger, I asked if he was sure he hadn’t cut it off entirely. He hesitated, looked more closely, and then assured me that he hadn’t.

Oh dear. He didn’t recognize my sarcasm.

Wrapping his injured digit as tightly as possible, I gathered up various Kidlets and we all piled into the car to head, once again, to the clinic for stitches. Steve has had a lot.

Later, after he explained that the oil filter had been on so tight that he couldn’t unscrew it so he ‘had to’ twist it in half, leaving a jagged edge on the remaining half which he then tried to remove with a pocket knife, I asked why he didn’t called out for me. I had been working in my upstairs office which had a window overlooking his shop.

He responded, “You told me that you would be working, so I couldn’t disturb you.”

*Sigh*

I silently ran through my mental list of Asperger traits. Lack of common sense. Inability to understand or accept exceptions to rules. Inflexibility.

I ran across a blog that illustrated this from an Aspie viewpoint:

I had no automatic sense of priorities – I’ve had to work those out by logic over the years. I had no idea that exceptions to rules could happen.

http://aspectsofaspergers.wordpress.com/tag/common-sense/

“Sweetie,” I said to my spouse, “It’s okay to interrupt me if there is 'big blood'.”

“But it was just a cut finger,” says Spouse. “A femoral artery would constitute big blood and I didn’t cut that.” He then launched into a monologue on arterial bleeding.

I sighed again.

I suppose it’s good to be needed.