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.”

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

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