DO NOT Try This At Home

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I don't think the word "Ouch" came out of my mouth, not even once.

Oh, I'll admit, the first few moments after I shot a nail through my finger a lot of thoughts went through my head, and more than a few words came out my mouth, but none of them were "Ouch." Go figure.

Last Saturday my son Steven and I were working on a side job, framing up a few walls and installing a few pre-hung doors to separate some rooms in a Kindergarten. We had been at it for about an hour, and to my mind, we weren't going as fast as I had hoped. I needed to finish to a certain point before we could leave and I didn't want to have to work Sunday. A late quit was out of the question, since my buds from University of Illinois were getting together that night, and I didn't want to miss the party. It's been 29 years since we graduated, and I was really looking forward to seeing everybody.

So I suppose I was rushing. And when my hand slipped as I steadied a stud in the wall frame, everything happened at once. The nail gun fired, my hand felt like it exploded, and I found myself skipping and hopping in several directions at once, squeezing the living daylights out of my left middle finger. I hopped/skipped out to my truck to get a band aid, desperately hoping that that was all I would need. I couldn't make myself look -- if it was bad, it would ruin the day's work and screw up my life in a major way. The electrician would have wasted a trip. The client would be very unhappy. And I would have to pay the ER bill myself -- working a sidejob with no Workman's Comp insurance has it's risks.

No band aids in the truck. Well, they were there, but I wasn't able to locate them in the three seconds I spent looking. I took a chance and looked at my finger -- bleeding out of both sides, but the nail missed my fingernail and it missed the bone. It went through at an odd angle, and apparently I yanked my finger off the nail without mangling much flesh. Damned good luck. And I was still too shocky to feel pain. So I squeezed the Hell out of it again, and went to find something to wrap it up with.

About this time, Steven noticed my odd behavior. "Are you alright? Did you do something to your hand?" he asked, noticing that I was about 17 shades of pale lighter than I was 5 minutes ago, and gripping my left hand like I was afraid it was going to escape from the end of my wrist...

I found my glasses and two cough drops, which had all flown out of my shirt pocket in the initial leap. I unwrapped a cough drop and tossed it in my mouth like it was a huge Oxycontin.

"Go in the truck -- get me two Advils. I shot a fucking nail through my finger," I explained, as calmly as a man with a fresh nail-sized hole in his finger might explain. Not exactly Clint Eastwood cool, but at least I wasn't crying.

Steven was suitably impressed -- he offered to drive me to the ER or wherever. He seemed skeptical when I said I was OK and that we'll just keep on like nothing happened. "Shouldn't you get a doctor to look at it? Don't you need a shot or something?" No thanks -- I just had one... (RIM SHOT)

I wrapped the finger in a kleenex, and wrapped that with some green electrical tape to keep pressure on it. I was operating at Level 10 Denial. If I just believed it would be alright, the it would be alright. Steve got me 3 Advils, just to be sure, and ran some water in the sink. He turned on the hot water in all the excitement, but I washed down the Advil with it anyway. Then I pounded the nail back out of the 2x4 and put it in my pocket. I don't know why -- maybe subconsciously I thought if it was in my pocket, it couldn't do that to me again.

The finger bled for a while, which is a good thing. Bleeding cleans the wound, I thought. And I changed the bandage every hour or so. I washed it off about noon with some hand sanitizer, at which point I said a lot of things that substituted for "ouch," but were much more colorful. That was the first time it really hurt -- up till then it just throbbed and ached.

We finished up the job a little ahead of schedule. Aside from a garbage can full of bloody bandages, you'd never even know I did something really, really stupid in there this morning. I'm sure some Kindergarten teacher had a puzzled look on her face at some point on Monday morning.

And once he knew I was OK, Steven got to use my accident as a shield... every time I gave him grief about anything, he'd just grin and add, "this coming from the man who shot a nail through his finger this morning."

So we learned a valuable lesson, made some money, and I never even said ouch.

Until the tetanus shot Monday morning. Ouch.