Night Out to Nightmare in Thirty Seconds.

If you fol­low me on Twitter, or Facebook or even just par­tic­u­larly pay atten­tion to this site you should know by now that I mas­sively fucked up my hand last week­end. Since then, I have received numer­ous requests to explain just what the hell hap­pened. I do appre­ci­ate the con­cern (or just sick curios­ity) but I haven’t really felt up to the task of typ­ing this all out until now. I’m going to make this fairly brief, since the act of typ­ing is excru­ci­at­ingly painful. I’m also going to omit spe­cific names and loca­tions. If you already know the whos and wheres, nifty. If not they won’t add to the story.

The story begins last Saturday night. I was drink­ing at a local bar with a good friend of mine. Nothing out of the ordi­nary. As I was drink­ing I noticed that there was some­thing not quite right with my barstool. For those not in the know, the stools at this par­tic­u­lar joint are basi­cally a welded steel frame with a cheap seat bolted to the top. What I was notic­ing was that it seemed that the uphol­stery of my stool was com­ing unfas­tened. What I didn’t know was that the real­ity was much more dangerous.

At about eleven o’clock I returned from the pisser and went to sit down. As I did so, I grabbed the seat of the barstool to hitch it for­ward. Unknown to me, the seat itself sep­a­rated from the frame, and approx­i­mately one cen­time­ter of my left ring fin­ger slipped between the frame and the seat. When my (not incon­sid­er­able) weight came down on the seat my fin­ger was trapped between the ply­wood seat and the steel frame.

At that point I felt the worst “pinch” I have ever expe­ri­enced. I wrenched my fin­ger loose and imme­di­ately clutched it in my left hand. My com­pan­ion turned to me to ask what was wrong just as I took a look a quick look at my fin­ger. I expected to see a pos­si­bly bruised fin­ger­tip; maybe even a bro­ken nail. Instead I was greeted by a ragged lump of torn flesh with bone stick­ing out. Not pleas­ant, I assure you. Fortunately my body goes into shock quickly. So instead of pass­ing out like I wanted to, I whipped a nap­kin off of the bad and clamped it around my fin­ger. Turning to the bar­tender I said, “I need an ambulance.”

To turn a hell­ishly long story short, the EMTs arrived, quickly ban­daged my hand and began a search for the miss­ing fin­ger­tip, which they even­tu­ally found still wedged in the barstool. I was then trans­ported to a local hos­pi­tal where it was deter­mined that the fin­ger was not a can­di­date for reat­tach­ment. A sur­geon was con­tacted, who decided that he could repair the dam­age with out­pa­tient surgery (which I had Tuesday) and I was released. All through this my com­pan­ion remained with me until my fam­ily proper could be con­tacted, which undoubt­edly allowed me to retain what san­ity I had left at that point.

So that’s the story so far. I won’t know until my fol­lowup exam exactly how much fin­ger was lost, although a good cen­time­ter seems likely. Also unknown at this point is the sta­tus of my fin­ger­nail re-growth. The sur­geon was opti­mistic but not definitive.

There you have it, now I need to take some drugs.