Get Glue

It is said that over time, married couples begin to resemble one another.

Fortunately for my Supermodel Wife, this isn't the case in our situation. I mean, it would be a tragedy for her to begin to look like an old, fat, bald guy just because she had the bad judgment to marry a wildebeest like myself.

But that's not to say that over the course of years, shared experiences haven't given us a few physical similarities. Such an experience happened over the weekend.

It was the first Saturday in forever that we didn't have some kind of social or familial engagement. So I had the day open to focus attention on some much needed yard work. I spent the morning trimming trees and bagging up the debris in the back yard, spraying weeds, putting out cancer-causing crabgrass preemergent and cleaning some spilled plutonium off the back patio.

Pretty typical suburban stuff.

By about noon I'd worked my way to the front yard where I was shearing back some shrubbery that had become overgrown due to the sudden spring and our many busy and out-of-town weekends as of late. I was making pretty quick progress on the overgrowth thanks to the Black&Decker cordless electric hedge trimmer that I received as a Father's Day gift a few years ago.

(Ever notice how all Father’s Day gifts are either clothing or tools to "help” you work more?)

Anyway, I was happily buzzing along removing twig after twig of overgrown Japanese Snowball and ornamental apple tree in front of our house. I was trying to avoid disturbing a robin’s nest (with three bright blue eggs in it) when I reached up to remove a severed tree branch with my left hand. Stupidly, I simultaneously brought the electric hedge trimmers down with my right hand, getting the business end close to my left ring finger… a bit too close, as it turns out.

The pain of the cutting blade biting into the fatty tip of my finger was still radiating up my arm as I ran cursing into the kitchen, a trail of blood droplets left on the grass, sidewalk, driveway and garage floor (not to mention my t-shirt and shorts). Instinctively, I put my injured finger under a stream of cold water in the kitchen sink. It took about a second to see that quick medical attention was in order.

The pad of my ring finger, from about the middle of my finger nail to about 60 percent around my finger, was neatly sliced and dangling by the remaining 40 percent of the fingertip, which was still attached and in pretty good condition, all things considered.

I wrapped a piece of ice to my finger with a paper towel while my wife and hero, who was making lunch, recruited our next door neighbor to watch the kids. We headed to the emergency room at St. Luke’s South. After a quick three and a half hour wait, a tetanus shot and me explaining the accident three or four times to various nurses and doctors, I returned home with my finger tip superglued back in place underneath a Band-Aid with instructions not to get it dirty or wet.

Now, for those of you who have been reading this blog for a few years, some of this might sound vaguely familiar. But I can assure you that I’m not making up new stories due to a lack of anything else to write about. I mean, I do have a lack of anything interesting to write about, but I’m not repeating stories because of it.

It so happens that a similar accident befell my Supermodel Wife a couple of years, only in her case the cutting instrument was a cheese slicer, and she lost part of her thumb. You can read more about that at the link, but here’s a reminder of what it looked like after a week or so of healing.
For comparison, looking at this picture of my ring finger after a day or two of healing, you can see that it’s not near as bad.
But still it’s one of those shared experiences that helps make us old married folks begin to look like each other.

UPDATE:
There's still a lot of healing to do. The glue used on my finger turned out not to be so super so I went to the walk-in clinic this morning to get it redressed and re-glued. According to the Nurse Practitioner I saw, the glue used costs about $200 per .5ml vial. Thank you Obamacare!

tagged: injury, finger, medicine, home improvement, accident, hedge trimmer