Yee-oww!!!

Well, it finally happened the other day: my first power-tool related injury. Yay, me!

No, I didn't lose any digits or suffer significant blood loss. But the middle finger of my left hand has seen better days, let me tell you! What happened was this: I was cutting a small piece of wood on the miter saw. Unfortunately, I failed to note the presence of a nail in the piece I was cutting, which was my major mistake on this procedure. Of course, the whirling blade of the saw hit the nail, causing the tiny piece of wood to buck. One piece, on the opposite side of the saw from me, shot off in a straight line, while the other attempted to shoot off in the exact opposite direction. Its trajectory was blocked, however, by the tip of my middle finger.

The impact actually caused my fingernail to split right down the middle about a quarter of an inch, and of course there was some bleeding. It didn't hurt much, though -- it went straight from normal to "really numb". I quickly ascertained that nothing was broken inside there, as I was able to wiggle the finger without any pain, but I could already see the large bruise forming underneath the nail, and within an hour, the whole tip of that finger was starting to swell. I cleaned it out nicely, bandaged it, and went about my business. And I still had to get that wood cut down to what I needed for a job, so it was right back to the saw. Hey, if the horse throws you, you get right back on, no?

Over the next day or two, my finger proceeded to do this really neat thing where it slowly shifted colors from normal to red to blue to purple to black-and-blue and then started to fade back toward normal again. It was like having part of my body acting as a mood-ring, but where all of the colors stood for "Ouch". By the second morning after the mishap, the finger had started to revert to normal size after some pretty impressive swelling, and now it pretty much feels normal except for the front part of the nail, which is still split, of course. Nothing to do about that except wait for that part of the nail to grow out. If the nail weren't split, I probably wouldn't even be wearing a bandage on the finger at all, but I discovered that the problem with having a nail split like this is that if it's not bandaged, the jaggy split in the middle tends to snag on stuff, which is exactly as unpleasant a sensation as it sounds.

The upshot is that having this bandage on my finger makes typing a bit more of an adventure than it usually is. I'm hitting 'backspace' more often than usual. (For instance, in the just-concluded sentence, I originally had an 'r' in 'often'.) Oh well, it's the perils of the job, no?

But hey, I got the job done. Because, hurt finger or no, I'm a pro.