Oops!

Maybe May be a rough month for my hands. Last year, I was perhaps the 21st Century's first digging stick laceration. Today, it was a machete. I was lopping off branches from some bamboo and feral shrub sticks to make poles for beans and hops to climb.

A neighbor was clearing out the side jungle, and I made off with the poles. Walking down the street with a 12-foot bundle of vegetation for the first time in a long time felt good. The neighbor offered a pair of loppers, but for some reason I am always afraid I will accidentally remove a digit with thise things, and there's something so satisfying as the sing and sing of a Brazilian blade slicing through twiggery. My regular machetes (the hand-carved hog-hilted one, and the one with the nice copper handle grip) were either in the truck out front or not immediately obvious, so I went with a miniature one, noticing that it had an unusual single-bevel edge, not very sharp.

With the blade sharpened only on one side as it was, I should have been cutting left handed, but due to terrain and laxness I did it the other way around, with the bevel making the knife glance away, and within a few swings, into my small finger (which in my way of typing, is completely unnecessary). Turns out, the dull blade is still enough to hit bone when all it hits is the weak skin on the backside of a pinky.

Annoyingly, holding my finger tautly straight was not enough to hold the wound shut, and I was forced to suspend operations within a minute or two. As per my own feral sense of medical treatment, I let it bleed a bit to flush out the wound (and, per my superstitious sense of spiritual treatment, to make a blood sacrifice to maybe flush out, as they say, some "recent unpleasantness") before heading in to hunt for a butterfly bandage. (Note to Self: Get some replacement butterfly bandages soon.)

One quick wash, pressure napkin application, and house-wide search later, I slathered on some triple antibiotic ointment, laid a tiny bandaid along the slice, butterfly over that along the finger, and finally one of those ever handy extra-long bandaids to seal the deal. Seriously, it is pointless to deal with any finger injury that's not on the very tip without the extra long bandaid. Go get some now. Having the right bandages and of course the miracle triple antibiotic has saved me thousands of dollars in emergency medical treatment over the years, as has my loose attitudes toward hygiene, which bestow upon me a diverse and infection-resistant microfauna.

So anyway, all is well. I mean, the hops poles are not done yet, but the finger is fine. Nice thing about a clean linear cut, they seal back shut without much trouble. However, next May I may avoid sharp objects.