Okay, hyperbole. It wasn’t even that bad of a cut. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell you about The Most Interesting Thing That Happened To Me Over Winter Break. Here’s how it went down:
It was Christmas morning. Being almost 21 years old, I of course still get a stocking full of candy (and this year, an external hard drive!) from “Santa,” so I was up in my room eating Twix bars and going through my loot. I was trying to open a particularly stubborn little package, and for some reason it was sealed with the heaviest-duty heavy-duty tape I’d encountered yet that holiday season. After some futile attempts to peel it off with brute strength, I looked around for a sharp object.
Scissors? No. Damn. How do I not have a scissors?
X-acto knife? PERFECT. It’s way sharper than a scissors, too, so theoretically it’ll work even better.
I had bought the thing for cutting tiny pictures out of magazines to make collages (my secret love), but here it revealed its true purpose: destroying excessive packaging. So I hunkered down, holding the package steady with my left hand and putting all my weight behind the X-acto knife, blade up, in my right hand.
And then the predictable happened: the knife slipped away from the stubborn tape and sliced right into my left index finger. It took me a moment to feel the pain, but as soon as I saw the blood I scrambled down the hall to the bathroom. I didn’t even scream; I believe I only uttered a few panicked obscenities. I arrived in the bathroom. Frankly, I had no idea a finger could bleed so much. I tried to wash the blood away in the sink, and then, shaking, managed to grab a hunk of toilet paper to absorb the blood pouring out. At this point, I looked at myself in the mirror. I am already very white, but I had become so pale I was probably almost translucent. I stumbled three feet to my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was getting ready to go to my Uncle Paul’s house for brunch.
“I hurt my finger” was all I managed before falling over in her arms as my vision faded.
“PAUL” my mother shrieked for my father. “PAUL COME HERE RIGHT NOW CATHERINE CUT HERSELF AND SHE’S FAINTING CALL 911 SHE’S THROWING UP”
My father rushed in to see me on the floor, toilet paper grasped around my finger. Somehow a towel ended up in my lap, and I promptly vomited into it. I was lucid enough to realize I was throwing up blood. All this from a cut on my finger?
My mother called the paramedics while my head swam. Tiny fireworks exploded in front of my eyes for a few long moments before the world came back into view. I estimated my body temperature to be about 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. Minutes later, seven or eight burly paramedic dudes hustled into my parents’ room. I showed them my tiny cut, which had stopped gushing blood. “Oh yeah,” one of them said, “you’ll need one or two stitches in that.”I was conscious again, and I could tell the paramedics realized that this cut probably wasn’t a very big deal. I bet they got into the ambulance and laughed about it.
But I still had to go to the ER, so my heroic father volunteered to drive me. In the car, I did what I always do: I texted Kristine to tell her about it. “I love that you text me things like this,” she typed. “Don’t die.” I didn’t make any promises.
The ER is a bleak place on Christmas Day. Next to me, a sad-looking guy still in his pyjama pants clutched a bloody cloth to his fingers. Snowblower accident, I guessed. I tried not to imagine what his hand looked like under the bandage. It was probably missing fingers. After about an hour of waiting, I got a hospital bed.
My father sat next to me, reading his new Kindle. I turned on the TV and found it was already tuned to–hallelujah!–Animal Planet. To my utmost delight, there appeared to be a “Dogs 101″ marathon on, a show with which I was unfamiliar but quickly grew to love. The first episode was on Welsh Corgis, the breed of dog that has been scientifically proven to cheer up people suffering from X-acto knife trauma.
I was hooked up to a machine that took my blood pressure every 20 minutes. It feels nice the first time, but after three hours, it feels like the cuff is trying to squeeze all the fat out of your arm. Every half hour, the same nurse would poke her head in and ask, “Can I get you anything, honey?” I always said no, though I suppose I could have asked for some crackers or something. I was pretty hungry.
The fifth episode of Dogs 101 was about rare dog breeds. My favorite was the Puli. It looked like a mop. The doctor finally arrived, along with her cute assistant who was assigned to clean out my cut. I took one last look at the gash, with its tiny puffs of yellow adipose tissue poking out, before offering it to the doctor.
“Okay,” she said, “first I’m going to numb it. This is the worst part. Have you ever been stung by a bee? We’re talking African Killer Bees here.” She sprayed the African Killer Bee venom all over my finger. Actually, it was Lidocaine, and it didn’t sting quite so bad.
“Almost done,” she said.
“With everything?” I asked.
She laughed. “No. With the numbing.”
I was then passed off to the hot nurse/doctor’s assistant/whatever she was so my finger could be cleaned. This ponytailed butch hottie took my numb finger in her capable hands and cleaned it out, I assume, but I couldn’t feel anything. I quietly swooned as she washed out my gash, and was treated to another hour-long wait and two more episodes of Dogs 101 (designer breeds!) before the doctor returned.
She sat down next to me and I prodded her to tell me gruesome ER stories, but to no avail. The best I got was “People don’t realize they’re supposed to go out chainsawing and then have a few beers, not the other way around.”
Aside from some improperly applied Lidocaine which caused me to feel the first stitch (ow), everything went ok, and I got a big fat hunk of gauze to stick my finger into. It’s still numb near the scar, over a month later (!), but the doctor just shrugged and told me it could take years for those little connections to repair themselves.
So the lessons I learned were: don’t cut stuff with an X-acto knife blade up, or maybe don’t use sharp things at all, unless you want your entire family to joke about how you can’t be trusted with scissors. That joke was funny every time.
- The finger, later that day
Man, I cringed so many times while I was reading this.
Holy crap, why were you puking blood? Or were you just bleeding into puke? On a happier note I’m glad to learn about your secret love of collage.
Hey! Welcome to the club!
Well, about 15 years ago, I pulled into St. Mary’s City, MD as a crew member on the sailing vessel Pioneer, there to do sail trips in Delaware Bay for a few days.
We were invited to a “oyster” dinner at the Director’s house, where he got us a few bushels of oysters we had to shuck ourselves. No problem. We sailors all carried knives and knew how to use them. We were pretty hungry, since we didn’t dock until 9PM that night (we sailors are always at the mercy of the winds and tides . . .). We just went at it, no towels, or gloves, or tables.
I just happened to have lost my working knife on the voyage down from NYC and had to use my back up knife, a Swiss Army Huntsman folding knife. Hey, those things really come in handy. Sure, they’re stainless steel, not hardened, but they are sharp and they are still pretty tough.
So I’m working on my third oyster, a particularly troublesome mother-of-pearl that had some build up right at the hinge. I’m twisting, and turning, and . . . did I mention that these Swiss Army knives were tough? Well, the knife tip snapped. Luckily, it was a clean break and I threw the small chip away. The main knife was still usable, with only the top 1/4 inch of the tip gone. So I continued on my foray into oyster shucking.
Did I mention we had no gloves? We arby-dar types scoff at the mere thought of things like safety harnesses, steel-tipped boots and gloves, since we always practiced safety, so no need to rely on safety accessories as a crutch. Gloves dulls the tactile sensors in our hands, in a profession where we rely immensely on feel to control and manage our environment
Well, so back to the oyster. My third one. The one with the uncooperative hinge. The one that snapped my g-dd-mned knife. It should only need moderate force to jam the knife into the hinge and crack it open . . . almost . . . almost . . . Aaaarrrgghhh!!!!!
. . .
. . .
Ooops.
Did I mention those Swiss Army knives were tough? Well, it didn’t snap. In fact it jammed into the hinge really good. So good, in fact, that all of the force I applied to it made the knife buckle at the only weak point – the hinge.
No, the OYSTER’S hinge was still intact. The knife just started to fold in on itself. But whoa, wait! I stopped it in the nick of time – WITH MY RIGHT INDEX FINGER!
So my crew members noticed a bit of a ruckus from me and asked me if everything was alright. All I did was murmur, since my finger was in my mouth in an attempt to contain the bleeding.
Did I mention we were all sailors? We all had deprived childhoods, and this voyage here was our opportunity to rough it, and practice fairly unnecessary survival skills. An adventure of our very own that starts with the phrase “It was the worst storm in forty years . . .” – but that’s another story.
Well, good thing we were all certified by the American Red Cross in administering first aid. Yeah, great. I got three first-aid trained crew-members fighting each other to over-sterilize and over-bandage my finger while the Captain went to borrow a car to get me to a hospital. Hey, it was first aid, and although we know how to hem sails, no way was I going to let these yahoos give me stitches.
My finger got immobilized, then my hand. I stopped them before they tried to immobilize my forearm.
Where was holdup on the car? I’m bleeding here! Ok, he got one, but he was still writing down the directions. No, I don’t know where the closest hospital was in St. Mary’s City, MD (still don’t). Google wasn’t even a spark in someone’s eye yet, and we had GPS v0.1 – called LORAN, which is for marine navigation, not land-based.
So I’m walking around the place telling everyone I’m “No. 1″ without saying anything. I’m still full of myself as I walk to the car. Someone even had to buckle my seat belt, since I was too busy showing off my makeshift foam finger. Throughout that long car ride, I had the window down, my right elbow resting on the door, and pretended my hand was a gun, ready to shoot any deer that got in front of us.
I’m going to skim over the next few hour a bit, since it started getting embarrassing when I had to explain what happened to the Nurse at the Emergency Room reception, and the first attending nurse then the next one, and then the attending physician. I guess it was a slow night (I think it was midnight when I reached the hospital, and I was the only patient).
Three hours and seven stitches later, I returned to the director’s house to collect our things and get back to the boat. On of my crew mates cleaned my knife and gave it back to me. As for that oyster – well, I let him win and threw him out to sea upon reaching our boat.
Yeah, I learned my lesson – make sure when you shuck oyster with a folding knife, make sure the knife has a lock and that it’s positioned to fold AWAY from your fingers, because you never know . . .
BTW, I still have the scar. It’s a constant reminder to me that injuries will often happen to the body parts you use/need most.
(Yes, THAT LordChu . . .)
My gosh!! I could not help but laugh on how you cut your finger. I did the exact same thing…well not with the same stuff but the “too lazy to find a safer outlet” and cutting my left index finger with my right hand.Creepy because I did it while Christmas time as well! Also, I felt the same way! I am actually in the process of writing an essay on “The Scariest Thing that has Ever Happened to You” for Comp. and to have more information I was curious on what they used to numb my finger because that stuff hurt!
Omg u are kinda luckee in a way. U have FAB finger nails. I chew mine.
but I feel sorry 4 u. Are u ok??
:-b