"I have an emergency!"

This is not what you want to have your mother saying as she bursts into your room less than 48 hours after arriving in Switzerland.

She was making lunch while I was hanging out in bed. She had already brought the tuna salad to me for a taste test and all she had left to do was make toast. I figured maybe she caught the toast on fire in the kitchen and was going to tell her to go take care of it herself, but then I saw blood. A lot of it.

She had seen my brand-new (not-yet-opened) knife in the cupboard and decided she ought to wash it. It dropped while she was washing it and she tried to catch it... and it landed point-down in her wrist.

Anyway, so she was pleading with me to hurry up because she was bleeding out and she felt really faint and she thought she needed an ambulance. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get decent clothes on my body and a pair of shoes on my feet, but I can't get at my shoes because they're too far under my desk. I see a pair of her size 8 slip-ons poking out from under the bed and decide that the best course of action would be to cram them on my size 11 feet.

We get her downstairs in the elevator and I call for an ambulance. I explain that my mom has stabbed herself with a knife and thinks she's going to faint and needs to get to the hospital. The dispatcher asks me how old she is, what her health is like, and... whether or not it was an accident. (Don't worry, it was definitely an accident.)

The paramedics walk over from next door, asking me if this is really the address they're supposed to come to. Yep. I talk to them out front while Mom is bleeding all over my favorite washcloth inside and freaking out about how long it takes to bleed out and die when you slit your wrists. The bleeding finally stops and they take her blood pressure and get us to the hospital.

As we're getting Mom checked in at the emergency room, she remembers that she left toast in the oven on the highest temperature possible. So the paramedics call down to their center, "Salut Olivier. Tu pourrais aller au foyer à côté et leur dire d'éteindre le four au quatrième? Madame a laissé des toasts dedans..." Then they look over at me and wink and say, "The fire department's already there." Hey, not funny!

According to the nurse, there was an unusually large number of accidents that day, so it took awhile to get Mom in. Luckily for her, she managed to stab herself right between the artery and the tendon, just barely missing both. Now she's cleaned up and stitched up and should be fine in a week or so...