I just realized a day late that yesterday marks the five year anniversary of the worst injury I've managed to sustain in my life so far.  I really hope I never surpass it, although I suppose something's going to have to be fatal for me someday.  I'm hoping that's going to be old age, but you never know.

Anyway it was five years and a day ago that I was rolling a large piece equipment into a hospital through a door that was notoriously a pain in the ass to get through if you weren't an actual employee of the hospital.  You couldn't open it without a badge so you had to wait for someone to come through and then try to hurry through before it closed.  That latter part is what got me.  I saw the door was open so I tried to rush through and I was pulling a machine behind me.  The door swung shut before I made it through and managed to crush my middle finger.

I knew I'd hurt myself as soon as it happened, but I didn't realize the extent of the injury right away.  I mean, it hurt but it wasn't until I saw how much I was bleeding that I realized it was pretty serious.  Luckily I was in a hospital.  I ended up just abandoning the equipment in the hallway and ran for the emergency room.

They bandaged me up and shot me up with some morphine, which got me feeling pretty goofy.  An x-ray revealed I had fractured the tip of my middle finger.  I found out later from the hand doctor that I had nearly cut the entire tip off.  I had to get a bunch of stitches in my fingertip and the whole finger was in a cast for a while.  It was definitely not a fun experience.

Five years and a day later, I can pretty much use my right hand normally although there's definitely still some numbness in the middle finger.  I'm thinking there probably always will be.  You can still clearly see the the scar wrapping most of the way around the tip of my finger where I mostly cut it off and it still feels a little weird and sensitive if I touch the scar.  But I suppose it could have been a lot worse.  Like I said I could have cut the tip off entirely, or I could have broken multiple fingers.  As it was I guess I got lucky, if you can call getting your finger smashed lucky.