What a pain!

This past Saturday, while working on my grandson's tree house, I decided to see if my drill worked as well on flesh and blood as it does on wood. I can now safely say that it does indeed. I was driving screws with my cordless drill, when the philips-head bit jumped out of the screw head, and slammed into my thumb with all of my weight behind it. The bit punctured the skin, tore through the fatty pad, passing just below the bone and hit the board on the other side of my thumb. There was a perfect x-shaped hole on one side of my thumb and a dark red circle on the other side where the bit pinch my flesh up against the board. Needless to say, I spoke in tongues - loudly - and the drill flew halfway accross the lawn. I stood there vociferously venting my pain while blood dribbled all over the deck of the tree house. It's not a proper project until you've shed blood on it!

I'm not sure how I got down the ladder - don't really remember that part. But Michelle got me into the kitchen and had a towel wrapped around my thumb before you could say "holey fingers." I turned on the kitchen faucet and stuck my thumbe under the cold water, and watched the hole open wide and the bloody water stream down the drain. Michelle said, "Nope, we're going to the emergency room." And so we did. We got there about noonish and we left about 3:30. Unfortunately, just after I arrived, there was a large accident near the hospital. Soon, gurneys were rolling in with accident victims, people in neck braces with far more problems than a punctured thumb. To make matters worse, the ER physician's assistant was stuck in traffic on the other side of the accident and couldn't get to the hospital, cuz the cops weren't directing traffic.

Anyway, the P.A. finally arrived, checked out my thumb, dunked it into a bucket of brown disinfectant stuff, and left. She returned a few minutes later with a hypodermic full of numbing juice, and said, "This is gonna hurt a lot." Now, this is a really bad sign. You don't ever want a medical person to say this to you, cuz medical people always under estimate how much things will hurt. If a doctor says, "You may feel a little pinch," you can bet it's gonna smart like the dickens. If one says, "This may sting a bit." it's gonna hurt a lot. That's just the way it is with medicos. So when one says, "This is gonna hurt a lot," you know that you are in for some serious pain. That nice P.A. jammed a hypoful of hell fire and brimstone into my thumb, and yes boys and girls I yelled. I challenge anyone not to.

Then came the X-ray to make sure I hadn't chipped the bone, and a couple of stitches to close up the hole, and then we waited some more. And waited. And waited. By the time they discharged me, the numbing stuff was wearing off, and my thumb was beginning working itself up for some serious throbbing andf stinging. It would take us almost an hour to get home so that I could get some Advil into me and take the edge off the pain.

Lessons to be learned: slow down, pay better attention, and keep your hands out of the way.

Things to be thankful for: I didn't fall out of the treehouse!