How I Cut Off My Thumb

8/25/06

My fiancé will undoubtedly not read this post. I say that because any sort of injury to fingertips, whether to her, someone nearby or merely expressed anecdotally sends her into fits of quaking accompanied by quickly clamping her hands over her ears and singing gibberish at unreasonable volumes in an attempt to shut out the unfolding story. Especially if the story involves fingernails. You know that movie Stir of Echoes where the girl’s fingernail snaps off on a hardwood floor? She still has nightmares. If you’ve seen the movie you undoubtedly know which scene I’m talking about. Just Googling “stir of echoes” and “fingernail” returns a staggering 14,000 hits.

So it was no surprise when Hanni roundly refused to look at what I’d done to my left thumb last night while cooking dinner. Even in my attempt to describe it she got this sort of pale, horrified look on her face as if I were relating a story about the time I raped a baby. I suppose at this point I should say I didn’t literally cut off my thumb. Only a little part of it.

I’ve been really rather seriously cooking for three or four years now, so I suppose I was due for a supremely nasty knife wound. I have two standard utility chef’s knives which I keep pretty honed. I still remember with hilarity the time I was inexplicably cooking very late one night and Hanni came out of the bedroom with a very worried expression on her face. To be fair, there is something unsettling about waking up to the sound of your boyfriend briskly sharpening knives at 3 in the morning.

But back to the matter at hand. (Please excuse the pun.) I was nigh finished preparing dinner last night and only chopping up some parsley to render the finishing touches when, I dunno, the knife slipped or something and plunged deep into the tip of my left thumb, slicing nearly all the way through the very end before I’d even realized what had happened; like I said, sharp knives. Oh, by the way, some of this is kinda graphic. Long story short, I almost completely severed the last quarter-inch of my thumb. It remained attached by a thin margin. But the weirdest part of the whole accident was the fact that some of that fingertip included fingernail, which the knife had cleanly severed without much issue.

Now, if you can imagine, I’m standing there with chopped, bloody parsley, attempting to remove the severed fingernail from the ruin that has become my thumb. I had to (and here’s where it gets pretty gross) hold onto the part of my finger dangling by a thread, and peel the still-attached nail from the skin before I could fold the flap back over and attempt to hold it in place, staunching the blood flow with paper towels. Sadly, there wasn’t as much blood as I would have liked. All told maybe only a tablespoon came out.

After trying in vain to get Hanni to look at my thumb (“c’mon, honey, it’s really cool!”) I retrieved a bottle of superglue and managed to stem the tide long enough to douse the wound with a liberal amount, sealing off the tumult and keeping my wandering flesh in place. Yes, you can use superglue to close shallow cuts; it’s perfectly safe and works like gangbusters, as long as you still have skin to close and aren’t, you know, just drizzling the stuff into open wounds.

I felt very cool after all of this, like some kind of soldier out there in the jungle suturing up a bullet wound in between shots of rotgut whiskey and lobbing grenades back at the enemy position. In reality, I was just some douche bag who was pouring glue on his tiny knife wound while sipping on a bloody mary and watching reruns of The Office.

Thank the gods I don’t use my left thumb for hardly anything vital. I did find, however, that there is at least one case where this is not true. When I got to work today I went to unbuckle my seatbelt and realized that this task is normally the sole responsibility of the injured digit. Now, my car is kind of old and has many, many things wrong with it. One of which is that the driver’s seat belt release needs seemingly thousands of foot-pounds of pressure to unhook the strap. Apparently my left thumb provides the perfect balance of force and leverage, because it took me three full minutes of fumbling to actually depress the button by other means.

I was ecstatic when I finally succeeded, because I did not relish having the following conversation with my boss:

“Why were you late, Ryan?”

“Oh, you know, I was trapped underneath my seatbelt because clearly I’m a very tiny girl.”