Monday, January 14, 2008

The Double Mangling

OK, so, ages ago, I wrote about how I'd mangled my finger. The short story is this: I was trying to fix my pool thermometer with a butter knife (have those words ever been written in that order before?) and the knife slipped, and I cut my left index finger straight to the bone, right across the joint. It hurt. Ever afraid of doctors and hospitals, I decided to effect repairs myself. Long story short: The top of my left index finger is still completely numb and I see stars every time I bump it too hard. And not the good stars, either. Last time, I saw Carrot Top in a negligee. But it is healed, anyway.

Not one to rest on my laurels, I decided to mangle another digit just before Halloween. I was making vegetable soup and had just opened a can of delicious roasted tomatoes. I concluded that the soup needed a bit of water added to it before the tomatoes made an entrance, so I sat the can down on the counter, motivated toward the faucet, and sliced open the ring finger of my right hand on the can lid. It hurt. It was absolutely grisly. Just a few minutes later, John came home to find me trying to effect repairs myself, as before. I showed him the finger and he insisted this one was too bad to avoid the ER.

We went to the ER, I got triaged. The nurse put a band-aid on my finger, told me to be sure I held it STRAIGHT, and told us to have a seat. We waited. And waited. And then we waited some more. Finally, two and a half hours later, I got called back to a room. We waited. Then a doctor came. I showed her my finger and asked her if this little cut REALLY warranted a trip to the ER. She said it most definitely did. Because I had waited in the aptly-named waiting room for so long, my cut had actually begun to heal, so she had to rip it back open again. That was fun. Then she gave several shots of novocaine into the spaces between my knuckles. That hurt. Then she gave me eight stitches and a goody bag of splints, gloves, the scissors and tweezers used for my stitches, and several rolls of tape and gauze, and I went home at 3AM with a grim trick-or-treat bag and a frankenfinger for the holiday. They wrapped my finger HUGE, and I mean HUGE with white gauze. I went home, drank some wine to help me sleep, and mused about two things:

  1. How funny it would have been if it had been my middle finger wrapped so big (oh, how I would have relished that).
  2. How long I would have to wait for a minor procedure if the Federal Government took over the hospitals. (My theory is I'd still be there now.)

And so THAT is the story of my double mangling. And I still have baseball-looking scar on my right hand, and it still kinda hurts when I bump it.

1 Comments:

Blogger Darrell said...

You oughta update us on these stories. How are the fingers doing now?

2:12 AM  

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