How I Ended Up Bleeding In a Dutch Police Station

Sometimes a man gets hungry. This can often happen late at night. It might even happen when the man is slightly drunk. Maybe the man might decide he would like to attempt making a sandwich.

There is a problem with making a sandwich at 1 am while slightly inebriated. Alcohol thins the blood. At first this fact might sound irrelevant to the sandwich-making process. However, when you introduce the element of the knife (used to cut the bread ingredient) it’s alarming how quickly that fact can become relevant. Especially when the sandwich maker accidentally slices through their left index finger. This can result in that person proceeding to bleed all over the kitchen floor.

This is the situation I suddenly found myself in after my ill-conceived inebriated plan to make a bread-based snack went horribly wrong.

Blood on the Kitchen Floor

After the initial shock had set in I quickly started to open drawers with one hand, searching for plasters. I kept the injured finger up high in an attempt to slow the bleeding. In reality this only resulted in blood dripping onto my head instead.

This all happened the day before I was going to move in with my girlfriend. I was still living in a house occupied by two guys: myself and my flatmate Jochem. Jochem was out during all this, fulfilling his hunger with the much more sensible option of takeaway noodles. As most people will know an apartment occupied by one or more guys is less likely to contain anything practical like plasters. I gave up my search as quickly as it had begun.

The bleeding was showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. I left the kitchen in search of toilet paper to use as a make shift bandage. This resulted in me leaving a trail of blood around the apartment. It looked like some kind of horror version of Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumb trail.

During all of this Jochem came home to this sinister scene. I quickly filled him in on the details, put my coat on as I did so and finished the story with, “and now I’m going out to buy plasters.”

The Search for Medical Aid

And so I ended up walking around the streets of Amsterdam, at 1:10 am, looking for plasters. I tried to keep my bleeding toilet-paper-wrapped finger held high enough to slow the bleeding without looking crazy. I ended up holding it halfway up in the hope that I would only look half crazy. In reality, I probably still looked full crazy. After some time searching for an all night first aid shop I had to face the fact that there was nowhere open for me to buy plasters. I was left with only one choice. I had already thought about it ealier but I really didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have to. However, I could not keep on walking around and bleeding all over Amsterdam.

All of this is why at 1:20 am on a Tuesday morning I found myself standing in a Dutch police station (near Leidseplein), looking like a serial killer as I clutched my blood-covered hand wrapped in soggy wet red toilet paper. I used my best ‘please don’t arrest me’ face. I hoped that when I asked, “do you have a plaster,” the officer behind the desk did not hear, “I just killed six people.”

You might be thinking this is the point in the story where things take another comedic turn. Maybe I ended up on the floor, handcuffs around my wrists and the knee of a shouty policeman in my back as he pinned me to the floor… well you would be wrong.

A Very Dutch Police Station

The reaction I got was… Dutch. By this I mean he helped me but he really did not give a damn. He did not want to know the story behind my incriminating bloody hand. Instead he cut me off mid-explanation by asking me how many plasters I needed. He was probably thinking about the amount of paperwork he would have to do if he listened to a confession of six murders.

He then proceeded to take a large plaster out of a first aid box behind his desk. Taking some scissors he cut off the minimum amount possible instead of just giving me the whole thing. There was a look of annoyance on his face when I asked for more. He cut an even smaller strip and pointed in the direction of the bathroom, telling me that I better clean my injury (while still managing to show nothing that could be classified as concern).

I entered the bathroom, clean my finger in the sink and once again tried to get the bleeding under control. By the time I accomplished this I had also managed to cover the sink, tiles and some of the floor with a lot of DNA evidence. It didn’t seem like a good idea to leave a police station bathroom covered in blood. I quickly cleaned everything up before the CSI team could be called in to figure out what the hell had just happened.

After exiting the bathroom I made the Dutch policeman even grumpier by asking if I could have another plaster. “Just in case there is another breach,” I explained. He cut the smallest possible amount again. This was probably in an attempt to avoid it being counted as aiding and abetting in court.

Cleaning up the Evidence

I returned home to discover that Jochem had been nice enough to clean up the blood I had left all over our kitchen. Maybe this was to avoid awkward questions about my ‘disappearance’ after I ‘moved in with my girlfriend’. He was understandably confused by my story about the Dutch police station.

I stood in the kitchen and thought about eating the sandwich to help counteract the blood loss weakness. I looked at my finger, picked up the sandwich and threw the damn thing in the bin.

In hindsight, I probably should have gone to the hospital when it happened. It was a very deep cut, it took several days to heal and I still have a scar. A Dutch police station might not be the best place to seek medical assistance. However, it’s probably better than other places I could have gone.

I keep on thinking about the officer in the police station. He would have had to write something in the overnight log book about he incident. I imagine it was something like:

“Idiot Englishman came in after doing something stupid that resulted in him cutting his finger. Could not be bothered. Gave him a plaster so he would go away.”


Read about the other time I almost ended up in a Dutch police station in: The Time I Was Almost Arrested By Dutch Police


Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

29 Responses

  1. Wendi says:

    That’s why I only eat string cheese in the middle of the night. Love the image at the bottom.

  2. Invader Stu says:

    Thanks. I think from now on I should do the same.

  3. Anita says:

    And ? What did you have to eat after throwing the dammned sandwich in the bin ? That’s the big mistery of this post. Suspended end. End ?

  4. Invader Stu says:

    As I recall I had lost my appetite at that point :p

  5. Dragonlady says:

    Stuart, He wasn’t a very nice policeman was he and he didn’t phone me either.

  6. Rose DesRochers says:

    You weren’t wearing anything nice were you? Blood stain is so hard to get out of clothes.

  7. Invader Stu says:

    Dragonlady – I wonder how grumpy he would have got if I had asked him to.

    Rose – Luckily I was not otherwise that would have made things much worse.

  8. Joop Mul (Jo Mulholland=Ozcloggie) says:

    “Assed” or assessed? Sounds a bit rude. (LOL) One of the fingers that I am typing with, has a scar on it. It started very small because my cousin (female) ripped my finger, in Scheveningen, in about 1950, when she wanted the toy car I was holding. I’m looking forward to seeing her again, in December. In 2005, she took me on the canal trip through Amsterdam. Greetings from Sydney.

  9. Invader Stu says:

    Are you planning to try and get the car back when you see her again? :p

  10. Andrew (polyworld) says:

    Yikes!
    Thats quite the story to have happen to oneself at 1:10am. Glad it didn’t result in any arrests lol.

    Andrew-

  11. Invader Stu says:

    Me too :p

  12. Brabant says:

    This will be related to
    a) Your english accent making you seem like ‘just another stag party member’ (the reason I never talk english when visiting ‘dam

    b) The Dutch are ‘pins’ and proud of it!!

  13. Guus says:

    I cut myself with a cheese knife and a roommate, studying medicine, insisted I go to the emergency room (you could see the bone…, yes it was a good old studentenhuis cheese knife) Once arrived, the doctor on duty sarcastically snickered: “oh, meneer heeft een sneetje?”
    Lucky my roommate had joined so I could blame it on her medical expertise.
    And I will never, ever, visit the emergency room any more.

  14. Frits Onland says:

    I once sliced ,y underarm very deeply while being engaged in putting the ‘lid’ on the outside homemade hottub we’d just finished building (that hot tube is awesome, but another story) and intoxicated. The sharp aluminium edge of the thing we were putting on it as a cover, for when not in use sliced deep. Went to the hospital. Got a doctor who got his doctor in training to make the diagnosis. she suggested stitches to which he answers ‘well, stitch him up then’ which she did. Afterwards he told me he didn’t think stitches were needed but they wouldn’t hurt either and it was good practice for his doctor in training LOL…. Oh I almost forgot, I bled like a slaughtered pig too…. Dam,n you alcohol for being so dangerous around sharp edges

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