Painful Lessons

It was a Saturday, rife with chores and family - hot, humid, sunny for once, unusual in this cloudy and cool summer.

Zachery and I had dug out his portable inflatable swimming pool out of the garage and, after a vigorous 15 minutes of sustained pumping and an hour of filling it with the hose, we were finally ready for some splashing around. Zack was complaining about the leaves and dirt that was floating in the water, so I hauled out the pool's portable filter system to try to alleviate some of his complaining.

It was stupid really, one of those accidents that, in hindsight, seem so utterly predictable and preventable.

Unable to find my screwdriver set, I decided to use a butter knife from the kitchen to tighten the screws on the filter hose. I fitted one hose and was in the process of fitting the second when I realized they were reverse. Annoyed at myself and distantly distracted by Zachery's ongoing complaints about the water temperature, I whacked the knife against the wooden picnic table and my wet hand promptly slid down the handle and onto the dull serrated blade, neatly ripping across the inside of my ring and baby finger, directly across the joint.

As I said, it only took one second worth of stupidity.

If I had done it even a little lower, it probably would have missed the tendons. If I had done it only at a slightly different angle, it probably wouldn't have even broken the skin. But I didn't, and I knew within a second of looking at it that I had done something seriously wrong to my hand.

After bundling Zack into the house and rinsing the blood off of the cut, I decided that this called for more than just a bandage. Even with my lack of medical knowledge, I suspected that I had possibly severed a tendon. Zack changed out of his swim trunks and into his clothes, watching me with pale round eyes and a frightened expression.

It was a given, on a Saturday, that his mother wasn't home. Generally on Saturday, she is checking on her aging parents, buying them groceries and lottery tickets, running errands and picking up our groceries. Absent our car, I banged on the neighbor's doors only to discover, as this was the first Saturday in the last month that had decent weather, everyone except Zack and I was away.

By this time, the washcloth I had wrapped around my hand was a vivid red, and with no transportation in sight, Zachery and I ended up taking a cab to the local emergency room. We left notes at home and a message on the answering machine, and headed off.

After waiting for three hours, I finally saw the emergency doctor, who proceed to stitch up my sliced fingers (with what felt like at the time hot barbed wire, but turned out to be ordinary sutures) and gave me an appointment with the Plastic Surgeon for an assessment. By this time my wife had arrived at the hospital, a look of mixed sympathy and exasperation on her face.

We headed home, me now with two fingers now swollen to the size of German sausages and utterly unbendable and a deep, abiding worry over the condition of my hand.

The verdict several days later from the plastic surgeon - a short, intense, elfin young lady with a matter-of-fact demeanor and, I later discovered, a terrifically skilled reputation for her work on hands and ear reconstruction - was that I had inflicted a very serious hand injury, severing two tendons. Surgery was required and I was immediately admitted and put on the wait list for a surgical table.

I haven't had a surgical procedure since I was twelve and, in all honesty, have a certain dread of hospitals and doctors. Zachery and my wife dropped by in the evening and according my wife, Zachery had been extremely worried about me all day, periodically crying. Visiting with me though, he seeme fine. Intensely interested in the movable bed, he pushed the buttons and shifted it in all the directions he could, later demanding that I get out and let him "ride it".

That's about all I have room for in this tale tonight. Thanks for the get-well wishes and thanks for reading the Dad Chronicles.

Part II shortly.