This sounds worse than it was...

This story that I am about to share with you may be both the funniest and freakiest thing that has ever happened to me. Seriously.


So, Sunday night I am sitting in my really cold house, working on a quilt. (Chad was at work, which is the reason he does not come into this story at all.) I was adjusting my fabric as it went through my sewing machine, trying to get a reasonably straight line and so forth. Suddenly, a sharp pain in my finger makes me both gasp and immediately stop the machine. Once the machine stops, I look at my left hand, and my middle finger is-- I am not kidding-- impaled on the needle. My finger got too close to the needle while feeding the fabric through, and the needle went through it and into my fabric. After a few seconds of astonished staring at my finger, I turn the wheel backwards to get the needle out of my finger, then start to pull my hand away from the machine to go clean it up. Can't do that, though-- because I have managed to sew my finger to the quilt and it is still attached via a couple of pieces of thread. Now I'm starting to panic a bit, because I don't want blood on my quilt. So I grab my scissors, cut myself free, and run to the bathroom, where my finger proceeds to bleed A LOT. Firstly (according to our head nurse), there are a lot of little blood vessels in your fingers, and secondly, I have two wounds for the blood to come out of. (Or one long wound, if you prefer to look at it that way.)

So I start washing my finger off, realise I still have two bits of thread stuck through it, pull those out, then look around for something with which to apply pressure and stop the bleeding. I wrap my finger in a towel long enough to get our first-aid kit out of the closet, pull out a gauze pad, rip open the package and wrap the pad around my finger. Meanwhile, I am alternating in thought between "Ow, ow, ow, ow" and "Who should I call to ask about this?". I work at a wound care centre, so I had plenty of options, and by the time I had my finger wrapped up I had decided on our nurse practitioner. But, of course, her number is not sitting next to my phone in case I decide to sew my finger to something. So instead I call our office, get the head nurse's number off the voice mail, and call her. Now that I have someone else to talk to, I start to lose it a bit-- but fortunately, she is one calm woman, so she said it would be fine, to put a band-aid on it and they would have a look at it at the office on Monday morning. So I put the band-aid on, go to investigate my quilt for blood (there wasn't any), finish the line I had been working on, and decide I was done sewing for one day.


So that's my story-- except that everyone at work today wanted to have a look at my finger. And that I have no pictures of this event, because I had neither a camera nearby nor the presence of mind to use it had it been sitting there. And I certainly wasn't going to pick up the entire sewing machine and carry it through the house just to get a photo of my impaled finger.