uh...did you get someone's blood on you?

They were new. I would have been a little more freaked out than "Damn, that hurts." if it was dirty. It didn't break the glove either, at least I didn't see a hole.

It still smarts after all this time.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." Jimi Hendrix

Good! I'm glad you're OK!

Oh man, do I have stories for you.

I once had a sliver break off under a nail. I could actually see it through the nail. Three weeks later, after growing increasingly infected and pushing towards the surface of the skin, I pressed down abruptly on the offending thumb nail and out from under it launched the 1/2" long sliver behind a geyser of pus.

Another time, I was using a 23ga Brad nailer, a nail gun for very fine, small pieces of wood. The nails it shoots are less then a millimeter wide, and just over an inch long. It's essentially wire. I was holding the two pieces of wood in position with my left hand, very close to where I needed to fire the nail. Upon firing in to the wood, I guess the nail hit a dense piece of grain, and curled right back out through the wood, through the bottom of my thumb, and out through the top of my thumb nail, splitting it in half.

On days like those, I almost wish I had stayed in school :-).

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Long Chile was a silly place.

I gotta know, did you just yank it out or go to the ER?

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." Jimi Hendrix

Na. I say you got schooled right there.

When I was about 12 years old, I was driving my dad's boat..dad and my uncle were in the back talking. I was coming up on my uncle's doc, and decided I could go up into the open bow and catch the dock myself. I was coming a bit fast and so I grabbed the first piling I could, and the boat promptly squished my thumb between the boat and piling. That smarted.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

~8yrs ago I was working on the battery connection of the race car. Since I would "be careful", I didn't bother to disconnect the battery via the killswitch. The wire I was fastening up was thick as your thumb. I was tightening down a nut with a small socket wrench, carefully cupping the wretch with my hand so there was no way the wrench could come into contact with the sheetmetal near by. It was about 1AM, classic "me-time" back then.

I didn't consider my wedding ring.

My wedding ring was titanium. Bought in '97, a couple months after, with much hand-wringing, I'd bought one of the early Colnago titanium roadbikes that, I was all a-gush about.

The ring found sheetmetal and there was a BANG that startled the shit out of me, and made me jerk back away from the car. All the sudden I was aware of intense heat coming from the ring. Lacking a more clever immediate solution, I spit on the ring a few times as I watched it burn thru my finger. I walked into the house and ran some water on it at the sink.

I went up to the bedroom and woke my wife. Telling her "I burned my finger so I was going to be up a while".

With my finger in a bowl of ice water, I mulled over my options. My finger was a mess. The burn was darn near to the bone all around the finger. No bleeding because it was all cauterized by the heat. The titanium ring, hard to get off under normal circumstances, was imbedded in the very swollen finger. I figured that the hospital emergency room, only a mile away, was likely to have a hard time cutting thru titanium, whereas I had all sorts of cutters and grinders associated with metal fabrication. So I decided not to head to the ER just yet.

I sat on the couch and watched late night TV until about dawn. The hours in the ice water bath both reduced the swelling quite a bit and numbed the finger. I managed to pull the ring off. Wasn't easy.

There were some challenges yet to come, but things worked out. The titanium wedding ring looks like someone tried to weld it. I don't wear it anymore because it irritates the dramatic scar that goes around my finger.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

That's great. Actually made me cringe. You could market that. Wedding ring branding.

P.S. You made me think quite a bit. I do a lot of stainless stick welding in my day job and I am bound to screw up one of these days. Maybe I'll start wearing a leather glove on the left hand.

A couple years ago we had a guy de-glove his finger in the exact same manner. He was disconnecting the battery and his ring hit the metal, he pulled back and the ring and the skin stayed.

Not a pretty sight.

I'd say you got very lucky.

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." Jimi Hendrix

I worked with a guy at my previous job who went to shut a stuck window in his house. Old wooden one that you slide down. So I guess he was really cranking down on it and it suddenly let loose and some how his fingers were all the way over the top of the upper slab of wood, so when it slammed shut it trapped the fingers of both hands underneath that wood between it and the window below. And he couldn't do anything to lift the window to get them out. I think he had to wait a relatively long time until a family member got home and was able to put the window up.

I can't imagine how bad that hurt or what his fingers looked like.

annihilated at a informal golf tournament where handicaps were a function of booze, drugs and ability i fell out of a cart

when i sobered up my finger hurt like a bastard and i saw dirt under my nail so i tried to scrape it out and pulled a splinter that extended the full depth of the nail up to the jointi

on another occassion as a kid we would try to ride round our block no handed

it had quite a steep hill with a left turn so you had to make the turn at the start so you had time to brake as you finished the lap

anyway i crashed. landed on my right hand and removed all skin to bone in two fingers

that left a mark

someone broke my thumb 4 weeks ago. that is also sore

When I was a little kid we had wood paneling in the basement, as everyone did in the 70's. We were playing some sort of nerf baseketball and the ball went behind the couch. I reached down quick to grab it and somehow ran my finger down the edge of one of the grooves in the paneling. The splinter ran down the edge of my fingernail and came out below the nail while sticking out above the nail (mind you, I was about 5 so it didn't have to be all that long).

That was probably the first time in my life I was sure I was going to die.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.