The day was getting away from me. I woke up late, for a change, and attended to shopping, cleaning, and bill-paying tasks. Usual Saturday stuff. I wanted to get all my chores out of the way so I could be free to join John and his out of town friends for dinner. As I was dusting and vacuuming, I turned the ballgame on. I got a special kick out of watching the game knowing that John’s friends were there, at Wrigley Field, soaking up the sunshine and waxing nostalgic over memorable moments at the old ballpark.

Ahead of the Cards 3-0 in the eighth inning, I was actually feeling pretty confident that the Cubbies would prevail and reminded myself that I had better take a shower now because I would be getting the call soon with instructions on where the first drink of the evening would take place. It was probably no more than two minutes after I got the right mixture of hot and cold (staying out of the tub/shower while my upstairs neighbor flushed his toilet) and started a preliminary rinse when the phone rang.

I had been in this position before. Too many experiences told me that there was rarely a call worth jumping out of the shower for. Why rush out of a nice steam-filled bathroom, prematurely draping a towel around your damp body, leaving a trail of water on the wood floors (necessitating a small mop-up job later) just to find out you’ve been auto-dialed by a credit card consolidating company? Or even if it’s a call from someone you want to hear from, do you really want to write down a return phone number on a pad of post-it notes as water drips down from your head, rendering your notes a blurry mess?

But the sound of a phone ringing is so insistent, so hard to ignore. My years as a customer service rep make a ringing phone almost impossible to shut out.

I grabbed a towel and, taking tiny steps, careful not to slip, padded my way towards my office. As I crossed the threshold between the bathroom and hallway, I felt a sharp pain in my left heel. Did I step on something? I finished my trek to my desk, by now convinced my heel had discovered some foreign object that had not been adequately swept up during cleaning time. Breathlessly, I picked up the phone. And I watched a growing pool of blood gather on the plastic floor mat where my caster-enabled office chair rested. It was John.

“Are you watching the game?’ he asked.

In a sort of altered state, I tried to form intelligible words but my mind seemed to have been entranced with the image of a bloody footprint (of my left foot) on my clear plastic floor mat.

“Yes, I was watching the game.” I mumbled. “But I can’t talk now. I stepped on something. My foot is bleeding.” Hoping I did not sound like a baby, I repeated myself, “I mean, my foot is really bleeding. There’s a lot of blood here on the floor.”

Without thinking much, I let the received slip back into place as I sat down and tried to look at the bottom of my foot. Was something still stuck in it? Getting a good look was difficult. I hated feeling that I was making a big deal out of a small mishap, but I was a little panicked. There was a lot of blood and I couldn’t see the bottom of my foot. Not thirty seconds later, I called John back.

“My foot is really bleeding,” I announced. “Do you want me to come over?” he asked. “Can you? I mean, just to look at it?” I added hesitantly and hung up.

He called back.

“Do you need band-aids? Gauze? Disinfectant?” he asked, a regular boy scout, obviously much better in emergencies than I was.

He was over in ten minutes. I was sort of embarrassed about my appearance. After all, I hadn’t actually showered yet. I was wearing an old shift, something I just threw over my head, i.e., a garment that didn’t require me to step my bloody foot through any waistband.

He found a big bowl in my kitchen cabinets for soaking my foot, concerned that I shouldn’t use a plastic bucket that had probably leached chemical cleaners when used for floor cleaning duty.

He washed my foot, doused it with peroxide, and got a band-aid in place. He tried to retrace my fateful steps and hypothesized about how the injury must have happened, then he cleaned up my bloody office mat.

I felt very taken care of.

Finding a guy who’ll make house calls is no small thing.