For my 24th birthday, my good friend Chad bought me a bottle of black label Bushmills Irish Whiskey. Unfortunately, my birthday fell on a Thursday, so the get-together we had was mostly non-alcoholic since everyone had to get up for work the next morning.
That Friday night while I was hanging out playine Quake 2 with Kellie, I remembered the Black Bush, and decided to have a glass on the rocks. Now, being a bachelor, ice in my house only came in large bags from convenience stores, because pouring water into trays is too much like cooking. Unfortunately, the ice in those bags tends to clump together.
So I grabbed a glass in one hand and a chunk of ice in the other and tried to cram the ice into the glass. When I realized it was too big, I pounded it on the remaining ice in the freezer to knock some chunks off, and tried again. No dice. But by this point my hand was getting cold and I was tired of dealing with the ice and really wanted a drink. So I started shifting the ice around to see if it would fit in the glass from different angles. When I realized that wasn’t working, I got a little ticked off and I just started trying to force the ice in.
And you can tell where this is going.
The funny thing is that as far as I can tell, the ice didn’t break the glass. What happened instead is that I crushed the glass with my left hand and then shoved my right hand into the broken pieces. And one of those pieces embedded itself in my palm. I tossed the glass and the ice in the trash, and started fishing pieces out of my hand. I thought I got them all out, but by that point there was a lot of blood, and I realized that I was going to have to go to the hospital.
This presented a number of problems. First of all, I was in the Air Force stationed at Fort Meade, which meant that my only choice of hospitals was Kimbrough hospital, not a place known for its high quality of care. And the other problem was that the only car we could take had a manual transmission. Kellie, didn’t drive stick, and my right hand had a big hole that was leaking blood.
Worse yet, it wasn’t even my car. Mine had broken down, and my buddy John had loaned us his Geo Storm while he was out of town. Not the ideal car or situation to teach Kellie how to drive stick.
So I wrapped my hand up in paper towels, then wrapped a hand towel around that. I held my palm against the overhead light in the car so that it would be elevated, and so that if it bled through the towels, it would be on the plastic and not the cloth of the interior. I had to shift with my left hand, steer with one knee, and try to work the pedals with whichever leg wasn’t steering at the moment.
Not really ideal transport.
And of course, jamming your open would against a hard plastic surface to keep it from bleeding as you bounce around the well-maintained (ahem) roads of Maryland isn’t fun at all.
But we made it to Kimbrough. Since we got there before even a dedicated alcoholic like myself had had a chance to grab a drink, the emergency room was pretty empty, and I got to see a doctor right away. The doctor injected the area with some anesthetic, and I remembered a story I had read about a new study released in the New England Journal of Medicine that stated that redheads required 25% more local anesthetic than other people.
I’ve always dealt pretty well with pain. Having my tongue and nipples pierced was a breeze. I actually enjoy getting tattoos. And evidently, I’ve had a number of kidney stones that I didn’t really notice. But like most redheads, I can’t stand to have my hair pulled. Pulling out a grey hair (an increasingly common occurrence) will bring tears to my eyes. And when I’ve been prescribed pain pills, they never seemed to work as well for me as they do for other people. So I thought there might be something to that story.
I realized that doctors probably don’t have time to keep up on those sorts of things when they’re busy treating patients, so I told the doctor what I had read, and he seemed to think it was interesting. He left for a few minutes to let the anesthetic work its magic, and I wondered if he was taking me seriously.
When he came back and started shoving the needle through my skin to sew the wound up, I winced in pain. He leaned back and looked me in the eye, saying, “You can feel that?” And then he did what doctors always do in those situations: he jammed his finger in the wound. I grunted out something like,”Sir, I know you’re an officer, but please don’t do that again or I will punch you in the face.” He nodded, added more anesthetic and left for a few minutes.
The second time around, after adding the extra anesthetic I had asked for, everything went fine. The told me to keep the wound clean and dry and come back in 6 days to have the stitches removed.
So of course I didn’t. I pulled them out a few days later myself, and didn’t worry about my palm for a few months until I was walking up a flight of stairs and felt a horrible shooting pain. For the next 6 years or so, any time I would bend my palm so that my thumb came near my pinky, it felt like somebody was stabbing me.
The reason, it turns out, was that there was a tiny piece of glass still in my hand that the doctor hadn’t noticed. Scar tissue had formed around it, and a nerve was between the glass and the tissue. I know all of this because in 2004 the glass started poking its way through my skin about a half inch from where my scar is. After a few days of it working its way to the surface, I was able to grab it and pull it out. The glass and scar tissue were easy enough to yank out, but there was a little string of fiber connecting them to my hand, and every time I squeezed the tissue, it hurt like crazy.
So I yanked it out.
I don’t recommend doing that. To say that it was painful is an understatement. I don’t think anything I’ve ever felt was as intense as that pain.
Now I have two marks on my palm. A little white line shaped like a 7 where the glass went in, and a tiny little hole that looks a bit like a sphincter where the glass came out. Having a butt on my hand is a little odd, but it makes for a fun story.