Table Saws and Mondays Always Get Me Down

Table Saws

Imagine learning to count to ten as a child.

Imagine clipping your fingernails.

Imagine picking your nose...both nostrils.

These are all simple tasks that can be easily accomplished by nearly everyone in the world...well, except for those who were raised with better manners than to pick their noses and let me assure you, the ManChild is not among them! The ManChild will go knuckle deep at the drop of a hat, much to the chagrin of the DixieVixen (not a big fan of the mining).

The sound of Karen Carpenter spewing anorexic ballads is dancing in my head, ad naseum.

Oh, how I long for the good ole days. The days of a balanced two-fingered peace sign. The days of "you're number one" being easily discernible if I held it up. The days of the high five. Typing, writing, eating cereal, washing my hair, wiping my rear end, carrying nearly anything, and turning on a light switch just took on a whole new level of complexity.

In one lightening-quick instant my whole world changed. Face it, I'm a man so scratching my ass and picking my nose are very important to me. So is using my right front pocket when I'm wearing blue jeans. One bone-headed lapse in judgment; one careless nanosecond; one crude meeting with a 10,000 rpm instrument of destruction and chaos changed all of that.

Mondays

The worst day of the week. Always has been; always will be. No day for anesthetic. No day for nerve blocks. A day where waking up early sucks bad enough as it is, let alone for the horror of a skilled scalpel finishing what you started. A day where many dread explaining their weekend exploits to their boss or coworkers. Not a day to explain how stupid you are. Hardly the day to be shown off like a circus freak.

"Who does that sort of thing in the middle of the night?"

"There's the guy who was cutting wood in the middle of the night."

"Why were you cutting wood in the middle of the night?"

They've never heard of "sleep cutting"?, was but one response...

If 11:00 p.m. is the middle of the night, then I guess you're all talking about me. Here I am. Yo! Over here! The guy with 62 lbs. of gauze on his hand. The guy mentally preparing himself for the lifelong reminder that fatigue has been known to cause complacency.

Fatigue + Complacency + Table Saw = High 4 1/2!


You see, DixieVixen and I had recently moved to a new house and we were finishing up the installation of a new wood floor in the kitchen. I know I had been burning the candle at both ends. I also know that, judging by the reaction of the medical staff, I am the first person to ever suffer an accident at the wee hour of 11:30 p.m.

I live in ALA-FRICKIN-BAMA people! Are you honestly to have me believe that far more bizarre medical curiosities haven't rolled through the doors of that emergency room "in the middle of the night"? Not a single mobile home moving accident? No one's ever accidentally discharged a firearm directly into their naked cousin in a tent behind WalMart under the influence of alcohol? Am I REALLY the most interesting medical marvel you've ever seen or do you just treat everyone like carnies? No one injured in a shotgun shell reloading/welding accident? No interesting "muddin" injuries? C'mon, surely at least one deer spotlighter has been on the business end of a 180 grain boattail! I don't know if it was in Alabama, but the penis in the meat grinder guy blew my teeny old partial amputation away! No pun intended. Are these medical professionals in Bama trying to make me think that there's never been a single Boa Constrictor sex accident? Christ, not even a little Meth Lab explosion?

If you haven't figured it out by now, I took the end of my right index finger off with a table saw. Upon finishing a cut (of wood), I was simply reaching from right to left across my body to shut off the saw and walk in the house.

PING! Turning that saw off didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped...



The sound of bone meeting table saw is one that can never be forgotten.

In my mind, of pseudo intellectual knowledge, I thought I was pretty calm about the entire ordeal. Without looking I knew that I had just topped every other anatomically disfiguring mishap I had ever inflicted, bestowed, or exacted upon myself. I didn't need to see it. I did, however, feel a compulsive need to squeeze my finger like a reticulated python hugging a goat. Calling the DixieVixen with as much calmness as I could muster surely must have sounded to her like the wails of a bear caught in a claw trap based on her complete denial. Well, maybe it wasn't denial, but all I remember her saying (screaming) was "NO!" and "NO YOU DIDN'T!". Well, as a PseudoIntellect, the best I could come up with was "YES!" and "YES I DID!". "CALL 9-1-1!" were my next words. Oh, and something about could she maybe get me some ice. Please. If you're not too busy? Thanks...

As the fire trucks pull up, shattering the serenity of Southern Suburbia, they ask me where the accident victim is. I am not kidding! I am standing there with my hand in a bag of ice squeezed, as tightly as I can physically squeeze, up against my stomach. Not hidden behind my back; not like I was trying to surprise some kids on Halloween with that old pull-a-severed-finger-out-from-behind-your-back gag. It's right there in front of me! I'm just standing there thinking "I have an obstructed bowel and lacerated liver, the guy with the jacked up paw is in the house jack ass!" My silent stare of amazement over the stupidity of their question must have answered it for me, because they correctly surmised it was me that was injured. I guess the ice was a dead give away after all. To this day, I am not completely sure how they ever figured it out. Well, this really should have prepared me for the freak show hospital stay I was in for. It didn't. I guess I thought that people employed in hospitals, a large number of which possess higher education from accredited institutions, were more concerned with helping and healing than trying to figure out how stupid one person can be!



To top it all off, it was a friend's table saw, codename:"Benny". As luck would have it, the DixieVixen called Benny to have one of his offspring watch the K-Princess, the E-Fairy, and the ManChild so she could accompany me, at that moment People Magazine's "Dumbest Man Alive", to the hospital.

As I sat there, being tended to by the city's finest, I see Benny walk around the corner.

Dude.

Duuuuude.

Duuuuuuuuuude. What the hell?

I know, I know...sorry about your saw.

I think the saw got the better end of the deal, let's see.

You sure?

Niiiiiice!

I could do without the mocking thank you very much.

Just wait until you come back to work...

Oh great....

I GET IT! STUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-PID! OK, now on with the healing...

I don't know why I'm surprised by this, but I did find what I could of the less fortunate part of my finger and put it in ice. (See I told you I was calm...maybe PseudoCalm?) The doctor in the emergency room dwelled and pondered on whether they could successfully reattach the finger tip. Well, for at least 1.04 seconds. That was about the amount of time it took him to spit out "well, that won't go back on". And so my fate was sealed...

Then it hit me! The accent...it...it...it isn't southern....it isn't foreign...it's...I'll be damned, I thought. "Are you from New York?", I asked the Doc. "Yeah, what gave it away?", was his reply. I was jumping up and down in my mind. A Northerner! Hey, don't blame me, I don't know anyone who gets an overwhelming feeling of intelligence when a southern drawl butchers the English language. It just isn't comforting.

Perhaps it was a result of my Damn Yankee attitude, but I was tortured for a while before the guards took me to my cell....I mean, Nurse Ratched took me to my room to let me sleep peacefully through the night. Well, it was "peaceful" if you overlook being awakened every 20 minutes for "vitals" and upwards of twice an hour to ask me if I was in pain. How do you answer that? Easy, given the proper mixture of pain killers! You incoherently babble on about how great you feel and that you'd like to see if you can shuffle a deck of cards if they have some handy. Maybe they know a good cheer and I'll just clap along? Well, sarcasm is not welcome in a hospital!

Sometime Monday morning they finally dug up a surgeon who wasn't doubled over laughing at my stupid ass to perform the surgery. Fortunately for me, he was a good one and believe me I know a good orthopedic surgeon when I see one. Take my word for it, most NFL teams can't stack up against the number of surgeries I've had at the skilled hands of orthopedists. (He did a great job, but I don't want to get sidetracked.)

The remainder of my hospital stay was pretty routine....for a bearded lady. The number of blue-and-salmon-colored-scrub-wearing-on-lookers rivaled that of any number of Dale Earnhardt memorials found in the Southland.

Well, they finally released me, O.R., later that day. What day of the week was it, you ask? What was the weather like when the DixieVixen walked what was left of her husband out of the hospital?

Rainy days and Mondays always get me down......screw that....table saws and Mondays always get me down.