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Sun, 03 Jul 2011

While chopping up root vegetables for dinner on Monday night, I sliced the tip of my left pinky finger almost all the way off. Christa said she had a "premonition" about it, and I kind of did too, which leads me to believe I was actually just chopping like a maniac and we both realized I was being reckless without really acknowledging the fact before it was too late.

It hurt. Even before I saw it, I knew the extent of my injury. I could feel what had happened, and there was a moment between cutting my finger and looking at my finger when I hoped what I was feeling was not true.

When I finally opened my eyes and looked down at it, though, it looked exactly how I pictured it. Semi-severed, gushing blood.

It seems that whenever I injure myself, the injury falls into a grey area between severe and not severe. It's severe enough to cause me a great deal of concern, but I'm unsure whether it's severe enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. I've been to the emergency room and I know how it works. They look at your gashed finger and think, "he'll live." Then they send you over to sit in a corner and watch informercials for the next five hours while they stitch some drunk's face back on.

I didn't go to the emergency room. Surprisingly, it was easy to stop the bleeding. I just stuck it the whole thing back together and applied pressure. Voila! Home surgery at its finest.

I promised myself that if it started bleeding again while I was at work, I would go have it stitched up professionally. It never did.

A few days passed and all seemed well. I changed the bandages frequently. I kept it clean. I applied antibiotic goo. After about four days, however, things started to turn for the worse. It got red and the severed part started to peel back, obviously no longer attached and probably no longer even viable. I went to urgent care expecting them to just chop it all the way off.

I check in, explain my problems to a nurse who takes my vitals, and wait for the doctor, a looming man I will refer to as Patch Adams. I start explaining my situation to Patch who shouts "antibiotics!" and writes a prescription before I finish my first sentence. He then leans back as if to say, "Problem solved. Anything else I can do for you?"

I ask if the antibiotics will interfere in any way with my rheumatoid arthritis drugs, or vice versa. He leans in for a closer look at his laptop and says, "According to the computer, you should be fine." Okay.

I ask him what I should do about the semi-severed bit that's still hanging there all lifeless. He tells me it will fall off on its own, and that if he cuts it off there will be more scarring. I ask for a Band-Aid.

Here he starts rooting around in the cupboards for Band-Aids, and doesn't know if he can find one. I start looking around for hidden cameras. He eventually locates a Band-Aid, which I can see through the wrapper is a cartoon Band-Aid made for children. He peels the backing off, tosses the Band-Aid itself face-down on top of his notes, then attempts to bandage my cut with the waxed paper backing strip.

"Oops, wrong one," he says. Then he notices that the actual bandage is stuck to his notes. I figure he'll go for another Band-Aid at this time but no, he just peels the spent one off the paper, ripping it somewhat, and applies it to my finger. It's at this point that he notices it's a purple cartoon bandage. "Hey, this is for kids," he says. "Well, you got Garfield anyway."

It's Daffy Duck.

This, friends, is why I usually just do my own surgery at home.

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