Accidents happen :0(

As careful as we wood workers try to be in the shop, accidents happen and set you back for a while. Such an accident happened on July 7th this year. I was working on some oak Adirondack chairs when the wood went the opposite way I intended it to at the router table. The short story is that my left pointer finger is now shorter than my right. It’s healing well and I’m assured by many men of my acquaintance that you can live full and happy lives with less than perfect digits ;0) Not that I recommend having a similar experience yourself….

This would be a picture of how the router table sat in the weeks following. I slept for a couple of hours after getting home from the ER, but woke up at 3 am in a cold sweat and after some deliberation decided that I did not want anyone to see the evidence of how idiotic I had been. The most prominent emotion I felt was one of embarrassment, I even told the anesthesiologist how dumb I felt as he was getting everything ready to take me into surgery. He was very kind and reminded me that we all make mistakes, or something.

The embarrassing part for me was I knew what I was trying to do wasn’t quite working out as I hoped, but thought I’d try one more time anyway. So in my embarrassment I crept out to the shop in the dark hours of the night to throw away the offending piece of metal and wood. I was surprised at how much better I felt afterward. It was a big relief to know that nobody else could walk out there and see exactly what I was doing before disaster struck.

There are many things I am grateful for right now, one of them being how blessed I was to get hurt when there was help available. We don’t have a large neighborhood, but there is a next door neighbor who immediately dropped what he was doing and drove me to the hospital.

At that point I had no idea how bad things were since I had gripped my pointer and middle finger immediately and was not about to let go. EvenTually once they had me on a bed and everyone was bustling about, the ER doctor said that they really did need to look at my hand and I couldn’t just grip it for the rest of my life. Funny, seemed like a good plan at the time even if my right hand did start to cramp on the way there. Not a drop of blood had escaped this entire time!

With the help of a nurse and lots of saline we were able to separate my hands to have a good look at the injury. When I say look, I mean the medical staff looked and I sort of occasionally peeked :0/

I was really hoping for a few stitches and a speedy return home…not quite. I did end up with 11 stitches though. Stitches that stayed in 3-1/2 weeks.

When they took the x-rays I was hoping that the bone wasn’t broken, they said something about the knuckle being dislocated. I wasn’t looking closely at anything. So much for optimistic wishes ;0).

Eventually I was able to send a text to my husband to let him know if my predicament since he was out of town…some of my kids didn’t exactly know I had gone to the hospital… Once I could call him, he arranged for the neighbor to go home and have my wood working friend Clint come to the hospital so I’d have a ride home. Even with all of the Covid restrictions Clint was able to talk his way into the room to see me for a few minutes. It’s nice to have a friend who will come to the hospital even when they don’t do blood and gore any better than you. Neither of us were about to take a picture of my finger. Jared was disappointed by this :0/ Oh well.

By the time the ER staff was talking about general anesthesia and surgery I kind of knew I was in for it. But still in denial, yes, definitely still in denial. Then there was a new nurse that had me take out my contacts and instructed the other nurses to remove my wedding ring….a bit of an adventure ensued, but not too big of one. They wheeled me down the hall where I had a nice little chat with the surgeon about whether or not I wanted to save the finger at all costs or if he could use his judgement in the case. I told him to use his best judgement.

I belong to a very loving church congregation that came over to pray with me the next morning. Both of the men showed me their less than perfect fingers and told me I was in good company ;0). The women arranged to have meals brought over for a week while I slept and held an ice pack, quite often at the same time.

By the end of two weeks I didn’t even need otc pain killers anymore, but that first week even with the good drugs it often felt like every nerve and bone in my finger was on fire!!! And sometimes the pain radiated through the entire hand. I was told to keep the dressing on for 2 weeks, which mostly happened, I loosened the bandage and cut away some of the gauze, but there was no way I was going to look at the actual damage before that two weeks was up.

It’s still healing, there is still a scab on the top where the skin is regrowing and I can’t fully bend the middle joint. From the back it just looks shorter, so that is the view I’ll share with the world.

I’m slowly getting back out to the shop, I have a million projects piled up and everything is going to be ok…even if I am a little scared of the router table at the moment. When I’m ready, I will be using it again.

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