Yesterday my wife had wakened in the pre-dawn hours, packed up the youngest and headed to Virginia for our niece’s baptism.  I stayed home with the oldest two kids because they had various things scheduled for the weekend, including my daughter’s soccer game.  Well we had torrential rains so the game ended up being cancelled which left me with something I’m not accustomed to: a Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled. I decided to take the opportunity to get some things off of my to-do list.

First up was assembling the dresser we’d purchased for the youngest’s room.  We bought it from God-forsaken Wal-Mart almost a month ago, but I hadn’t had the chance to put it together and it was weighing on me.  I opened up the box and was pleasantly surprised to find instructions that informed me that I’d need exactly one tool for the job, a hammer.  “Whoa,” I thought, “this is a job even I can handle!”

I continued unpacking the box and neatly aligning all the pieces, found my hammer, and set to work.  I had the first three pieces together in no time and was trying to get the fourth piece on when I messed up.  I misaligned the male metal bracket of one piece with the female metal bracket of the other and they got stuck.  So I pulled and tugged and finally got them to separate with a real hard yank.  Unfortunately my index finger got in the way and one of the brackets opened it up right nicely with an inch long gash that was deep enough that you could see things you ought not to be able to see.

I went into the kitchen to rinse it out and realized that I might need to get it looked at, especially when I couldn’t get my hand to stop shaking.  Honestly it didn’t hurt, but it looked nasty and I figured the shaking was my body’s way of telling me I’d royally screwed up.  So I recruited the oldest to help me bandage everything in place and then headed to see the folks at Davie Hospital.

We use Davie regularly because even though it’s twice the distance than either Forsyth or Baptist it is never crowded and you can usually be in and out in under an hour.  Since it was a Saturday they were busier than usual, but I was out of there in about 90 minutes.  They had a med student look at me and she wasn’t sure if I needed stitches or if we could get away with glueing it so she recruited a full-fledged doctor to look at it.  His judgment was I just needed cleaning, steri-strips and a tetanus shot.  So a student nurse gave me the shot and cleaned out the gash, and then the doctor returned to show the student how to steri-strip it, all the while engaging me in a cynical discussion of the impending economic doom being foreshadowed in Washington.  It was a lot of fun.

The doctor also put a splint on the finger to prevent bending, and thus reopening the wound.  They sent me on my way with instructions to keep my finger clean and dry which seemed contradictory to me.  I’m still trying to figure it out, but I figure if I get “stinky finger” I’ll know I need to do something about it.

Once I got home I recruited the oldest to help me finish the dresser.  It took about an hour, which wasn’t bad considering I was greatly hampered by the mangled finger.  Pictures of the dresser and finger below.