Stupid Is As Stupid Does

A View From The Emergency Room

There is no clever way to tell this story that does not result in the conclusion that I’m an idiot so I’m just going to fess up. The Friday before last I stuck my hand into a running lawnmower and injured the middle finger of my right hand. When people ask me about the large bandage on my finger, no matter how I try to spin the incident the inevitable response is “Boy, that was a stupid thing to do.” Even when people do not utter those precise words you can see that they are thinking it. I’m just waiting for someone to say, “Jim, life is a box of chocolates…”

I can’t blame people for thinking it was a stupid thing to do. That’s what I concluded about four nanoseconds after it happened.

After I injured the finger I walked up to the house and tried to sound casual as I asked Meredith if she would mind fetching me a couple of towels and driving me to the hospital. It’s hard to sound casual when the pain alarms are going off in your head and your brain is screaming, “Holy shit, this hurts. Go to full emergency mode. Battle stations, battle stations. Dive, dive.” If Meredith had replied, “I’m a little busy now, dear,” my next request would not have been casual.

I don’t have a lot of experience going to emergency rooms so I don’t know if my trip to the ER was typical or not. I thought there were some stupid questions. I was wearing work boots, dirty farming overalls and a shirt with its sleeves cut off, and I had a red bandanna on my head. Do I look like someone who visited Africa in the last 30 days? Maybe the red bandanna made the admitting lady think I was related to Aunt Jemima.

Fortunately for me there was a hand surgeon doing surgery at the hospital that day, and he was able to see me following his surgery. That was a good thing because I’m pretty sure the ER physician wanted nothing to do with the finger. The telltale was when he looked at the finger, screwed up his face and walked away. Unfortunately, it took the hand surgeon quite a while to finish his surgery so I was in the ER for several hours before he came in to see me.

ER examining rooms are not the most interesting places to pass the time. This one didn’t even have a stack of three year old magazines to read. The only reading material in the room was a flow chart on how to handle a patient with suspected Ebola so I’ve pretty much got that memorized now. I didn’t really understand all the medical terms, but what I got out of it is that the way to handle a patient with suspected Ebola is to move to another state.

Things got better after I got a shot of Demerol, but time started to drag. After I went through all the cabinets looking at the medical supplies I finally laid down on the table to take a drug induced nap. Just as I was dozing off, the hand surgeon walked in.

I got to watch the surgeon reassemble the tip of my finger. It was genuinely interesting to watch him work. As he was picking debris out of the wound he was telling me if it was bone, dirt or grass. When he was stitching me up I just had to ask him whether he had any hobbies like tying flies or quilting.

The injury is not near as bad as it could have been. My finger is an eighth of an inch shorter than it was, and my fingerprint is now off to the side a little bit. The large bulbous bandage at the end of my finger combined with the need to keep the hand elevated makes it look like I’m flipping people off.

If there’s any consolation for my injured pride it’s knowing that I’m not the first person to show up at the ER in Fannin County with a hand injury due to moving machinery. That’s not a very consoling thought. All it means is that there are a lot of people standing in the stupid line with me. 

Well, that’s it from my neck of the woods. The weather has turned nice, and everyone is rushing to put in their gardens, me included. The time in the garden will give me time to work on my Forrest Gump impression. That's all I have to say about that.