March 10, 2025 
I want some drama.
“If I were you I’d get off the phone with me right now and start calling every hand surgeon from Miami to Jacksonville,” says the doctor on the line.
No, you don’t understand. I want some HORSE drama.
“It’s already too late,” she intones ominously. No, that’s not right. She said it flatly and matter-of-factly, although I’m not sure what too late means. Does it mean I lose the whole hand or just the finger?
I wonder where someone is who can rip me off in a horse deal. Where’s a vet on the make when you need one? Can someone hook me up with a falsified PPE? Where’s the trainer I need? The one to sell me a million-dollar 1.45 horse for my 12-year-old daughter to jump a meter?
Meanwhile, someone is digging holes in the field. There are piles of dirt everywhere, dug out of determined little burrows. Who is doing this?
“There is your culprit,” says the text accompanied by a photo of a small falcon. “He’s the size of a potato.”
I do not want falcon drama.
And there is no way of finding a hand surgeon at 4:00 PM on a Sunday.
“You might have to wait a month,” says the doctor. “It’s really difficult to get a hand surgeon down here.”
I don’t even have a lame horse at the moment. All the Horse Care Specialists are getting along. The clients are happy. The riders are pleased. The horses are frolicking joyfully in their paddocks.
At night, the cane toads come out from wherever they live—under and in some places that are apparently spacious and hidden enough to house dozens of them secretly. They cover the field like a blanket of warts while the falcon digs his little burrows. They are an invasive species, introduced to Florida decades ago to eat the beetles that attack sugar cane. Delightfully, they have poisonous skin-gland secretions that can easily kill curious and hungry (they’re always hungry) canine companions.
But I do not want cane toad drama.
“On second thought,” says the doctor, “Why don’t we just give it until the morning?” She prescribes horse-sized pills that I eagerly gobble down.
On Saturday night, the wound was fresh. I sat sweating at my table in the VIP. Sweat was running down my neck and between my bosoms. I sat in a puddle of it. I complained, but no one else was hot. I wasn’t hot either, the sweat cooled immediately on my skin giving me an unpleasant, clammy feeling.
Someone said I had drunk too much whiskey. Someone else said I hadn’t drank enough.
Then another person saw someone she had contempt for (very rich, very well-known) when she went up to access the buffet. She came back laughing. “He’s at a C table,” she said with derision, planting herself back in her chair at our B table.
I hadn’t considered the alphabet before, but it was true—C tables, third row back in the VIP, were decidedly more crowded and less attractive than our second-row B tables.
I was almost ready to jump into this as acceptable drama, only to find out that the person she had derision for was not involved in show jumping at all, but some other, less interesting-to-me sport and…
I want show jumping drama.
We were geared up for it that night. At our table, we had a Von Eckerfann, a Kent Doll (me), a member of the Bond Girls (Ashlee’s fan club), as well as a member of the Bluman Group, the fan club for those prodigiously-numbered Bluman brothers, cheering on this 5-star night for Mark and Daniel.
But we did not get the drama that we wanted, a jumpoff showdown between our favorites. Only Henrik made the jumpoff, with the rest of us deflated like balloons in the face of the Von Eckerfann’s exultation.
“He’ll hold Kent off next month,” our rival gleefully predicted.
Meanwhile, my finger, fat like a sausage, red like Rudolph’s nose, throbbed with my heartbeat.
This was feline drama.
My little cat bit my finger, mistaking it for a toy, driving her canine tooth (very prejudiciously named by some dog person) deep into the flesh, leaving a pin-prick sized hole and a whole load of nasty, brutish bacteria.
Now, according to the doctor, I was facing possible, if not probable, amputation.
Even the Irishman was happy, the next day pronouncing everything “class” and “grand” while gifting me with a hat with the words “what the” accompanied by a picture of a duck, an homage to this column.
“Oh, that’s very serious,” he said when he saw my finger.
I never wanted feline drama.
I saw a bald eagle fishing in the canal next to a man fishing in the canal. But I did not want bald eagle drama either.
I sat in bed with the pain and watched YouTube videos of lymphocytes attacking bacteria and antibiotics exploding their cell walls. All this invisible drama happening inside me while I ate a Door Dash burger with my swollen index finger held out like how a snobbish person drinks her tea.
And now I’ve typed all this up using the half-dead digit, admittedly getting better after all those pills and flushes with hydrogen peroxide. It seems I might get to keep the thing after all, despite the paucity of immediately-available hand surgeons.
Deadline drama. Editor drama. I don’t want that.
