My first major injury of 2009 left me with a slightly shorter thumb than I used to have. It all started right before Christmas when I was shopping for a good gift for one of my roommates and I saw this 2 knife set at Walmart. It was the official Food Channel Paula Dean knife set for ten bucks! What a deal. Well, it turned out I really didn't end up having to part with them in a gift format and I really wanted to have some new sharp knives, so I kept them. So that's what started this whole thing…sharp knives.
Fast forward a few weeks to January 14th. Somehow the kitchen got really messy the night before the incident and I was sort of ticked off that the sink was still full of dirty crusty dishes and I wanted to cook dinner in a clean kitchen. No such luck! So, somewhat angrily, I unloaded the dishwasher, and started clearing crap out of the sink. It took me a good ½ hour before I could even start on dinner and I'd gone swimming earlier that evening and couldn't wait to get something in my stomach and was completely starving…aggravating the angry feeling. I finally got started on my dinner. Pork fajitas with some fresh peppers in red, green, & yellow combined with a beautiful sweet onion was the menu with some fresh sliced avocado. I was through slicing the peppers and almost done with the onion, when I got to the nub and one angry chop left mye clutching my bleeding thumb and running to the faucet to cool off the screaming, severed nerves. The amount of blood spewing out of my thumb made me realize I'd done something bad. I don't remember actually swearing, but I probably did. I mean, don't we all save the good swear words for moments like this? The pain wasn't unbearable, but the blood needed to be stopped. Luckily my roomie redeemed herself by running to my aid and finding some gauze and bandages. I put some gauze on the wound and at that point I started to feel a little woozy, maybe it was before, but sometime between stopping the bleeding and nearly passing out, I got a good look at the chunk of thumb I'd left on the cutting board. It was a large bit of fingernail with a significant amount of flesh attached….I'm woozy just thinking about it now.
I know it seems obvious that I should have immediately put the tip on ice and rushed to the emergency room, but I didn't think it was big enough to sew back on, so I knew the next step was to just stop the bleeding and prevent infection. Gauze and bandage would stop the bleeding, so I applied a gauze (no, not the kind that doesn't stick to the wound…that'll come back and bite me later) and bandage and presto! No longer bleeding all over the place, I was able to get back to the fajitas, but I certainly couldn't be cooking with a severed body party lying around…especially with a fingernail attached. It seemed unsanitary, so I threw it away. About 15 minutes after tossing my thumb tip, my other roommate came home along with a friend who happens to be a nurse. They got the gory details and then the nurse friend asked me if I still had the tip so it could be sewn back on. I started rummaging around in the trash with my good hand when she stopped me and said that it was contaminated at this point, so the hospital probably wouldn't sew it back on. Disappointment set in when I realized that I'd stupidly thrown away my chance to having a whole, normal shaped thumb.
So, I finished cooking dinner, ate my fajita which actually tasted really good, and then went to rest my body so my throbbing thumb would stop exploding with pain. Lying down seemed to help, but I'd luckily saved a ton of Percocet from my knee surgery a year before, so I popped a couple of those and went to bed. I actually couldn't sleep very well because it kind of hurt a lot but also because I couldn't stop thinking that I could have tried to sew the thing back on, or at least, stick it back on and hope it hooked itself back up. In a drug induced sleep, all things seem possible. In the morning, I got up and with the Percocet all worn off and with a throbbing thumb and a bandage really full of blood,I decided to try and change the dressing. That was when I realized that cutting if off was not nearly as painful as trying to pull gauze off a very sore, open wound. I almost threw up it hurt so bad! I definitely had to take a seat. As much as I tenderly tried to peel it off, I just couldn't tolerate the pain. There wasn't anything that was getting me to pull on that gauze, so I wrapped my thumb back up, drove to work with really bad hair, got my bagel (it was bagel Thursday), ate it and decided it was time to try and find an urgent care clinic.
I had forgotten my wallet at home, but was pleased to see there was an urgent care clinic in Springville, so I went home, grabbed my wallet, tried to find the clinic, then found it after visiting a clinic for on the job injuries who re-directed me to the right place. They immediately put my thumb in a solution to clean it out and get the gauze off. The nurse was really nice, but seriously, it wasn't coming off without pain even wet. Finally the doc came in and asked if I wanted to numb it up. Duh! Why would I go to a doctor if I didn't want pain free gauze removal? I told him I'd be open to the idea, so he shot me up with something, put on a rubber tourniquet (rubber glove…super fancy) to squish all the numbing stuff up the tip of my thumb and stop the bleeding when it starts. A few minutes passed and finally, the pain stopped. It was such a beautiful feeling to be without pain. I even pulled the gauze and couldn't feel a thing. It was also the first time I got a good look at the wound. It wasn't as bad as I had imagined, but it was a pretty clean slice. When I put my thumb at the right angle, I could see this very sheer, flatness left by the missing chunk of flesh. So the doc cleaned it up, patted some gauze that's supposed to help form a clot that I won't have to try and remove. Then he tried to bandage it back up. I don't think he does wound dressing very often because it seemed kind of awkward. When the other nurse came back in to give me a tetanus shot, I showed her the dressing that was already starting to bleed through and she promptly added more gauze and left me with a big purple bandaged thumb.
The dressing lasted until Saturday when I went cross country skiing with some friends and while polling, I kept knocking the bandage off. It's now healing nicely. I have a little, thin scab over the gaping part and it doesn't hurt unless I bump it good, which happens about twice a day. Moral of the story, don't chop angry!
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