Remain Calm – This is only a drill… (365:136)

This is not today’s picture, it’s a picture I took back in December 2010. But it is very representative, as this is the tee shirt I just had to wear today. Anyway, it amused me. My actual picture for today is at the bottom of this post and shows my cut hand without bandages. It may be gross, but as this is my daily journal I wanted some record of it. You never know it might make me think twice before I do something stupid in the workshop again (I doubt it).

I’ve been very lucky. In fifty-five years, I’ve only been to the emergency room twice and spent one night in a hospital. I managed to avoid the broken bones and major scrapes that often dog childhood. Ginger on the other hand broke an arm and had seventy-two (yes, 72) stitches in her leg. I’ve worked with power tools for over thirty years, and this was my first nasty accident, though I have had a few near misses.

This accident has come as quite a shock. The injury isn’t that bad – it looks a bit gross, yes, and it is dammed inconvenient, but it’s not too bad. However, because this is my first major injury it seems to have been taking a disproportional prominence in my thinking. The fact that it was my own stupidity, rather than an unpredictable accident makes it worse for me. Especially as it didn’t even cross my mind at the time that what I was doing was unsafe. D’oh! As soon as I have enough dexterity back I need to get back out in the workshop and finish off making my burner. Not before I’ve bought some new, even tougher, gloves though. And I’m sure I’ll be clamping down everything in sight before I start work for quite a while to come.

***

I spent a lot of the day uploading pictures and I’ve started reading for my final class of this academic year. The final lesson is a double, plus we’ve been given an exercise to do so I’m going to be putting in a lot of hours this week studying.

Come the evening it was time for me to reluctantly remove and replace my bandages. I say me, but I couldn’t do it single-handed, so Ginger had to do most of the fiddling. It didn’t help that I’d bled through the gauze and that had glued the bandage on. It took a long time to soak and pick it off. Today’s picture shows the top of my thumb, where my thumb was sliced through. I didn’t think I’d cut my thumbnail, but a closer look at the picture shows how I’ve very neatly sliced right through it. It doesn’t look too bad until you realize that this is the back of the wound. I cut it all the way through from the front of the thumb. Yuck!  This is shown in the second picture, which Ginger took for me.

That’s it. Hopefully, I can get my focus back onto other things now.   

Copyright © 2011 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.