Posts tagged saw

Naturally the table saw wins.  Here’s what happened to me.

It was my daughter’s 7th birthday.  She was having a zuzu pet party.  We bought all the guests zuzu pets to have and play with at the party.  I wanted to make some tunnels they could go through, so I made a test tunnel out of PVC pipe.  I basically filleted one side of the 3” pipe to make an arched tunnel.  The test worked great so I went to make 5 more.

I was pushing the first pipe through the saw when the pipe bound up in the blade and kicked away.  My hand then fell on to the spinning blade.  In microseconds my index finger and thumb were eaten by the blade.  I saw the damage to my hand and shouted as loud as I could so someone upstairs would hear in case I didn’t make it up the stairs.  That was the last time I looked at my hand because I knew I would faint if I saw it again.  I saw my first finger hanging and my thumb opened up wide.

I made it upstairs on adrenalin and wrapped my hand in a towel to put pressure on it and control bleeding.  Arianne called 911 and I sat at the sink with my hand wrapped.  Eleanor, the 7 year old birthday girl got a bandaid for me.  I knew a bandaid couldn’t fix this.

The ambulance came in 4 minutes and after assessing my injury the paramedic wrapped my hand and loaded me in the rig.  They started an IV, gave me some morphine, and off we went.  I heard they were taking me to Barnes instead of the hospital up the street - it was clear this was because of the severity of my injury.

I was in the ER for about 4 hours before going to surgery.  In ER a woman from ortho cleaned the wound and picked out some PVC shavings.  That was the only time it really hurt.  Once she rewrapped my hand, it felt better.  During this, I could tell my index finger was not fully attached any more.  However, I still had feeling in all my digits.

I waited in surgery for another hour because of another emergency.  I thought mine was pretty bad, but apparently someone else was worse.

They put 6 pins in my index finger to keep it aligned.  I was in surgery about 3 hours.

I felt good all night.  My hand is in a cast and wrapped.  I can still feel and move all digits, so the prognosis is good.

I do have pictures, but I haven’t seen them yet.  I hear they look pretty bad, and unfortunately look better than it did in real life.