Outside, cutting a piece of 2x1 with a handsaw. Finished cutting wood and decided to cut hand!
(Not quite sure what happened - I had finished the actual sawing. Maybe the blade got caught in the sawcut and sprang out across my hand? Right through fairly stout fabric gloves. Deep cut just below first finger of left hand.)
Blood, blood and a bit more blood. Wrapped up hand in bandage and drove to A&E. (Minor unjuries unit, actually - real A&E too far away for me to have driven.) Apart from no parking places - which is difficult when hand is painful and bleeding everywhere - seen to, x-rayed and sewn up quite quickly.
Wearing a sling and waiting for pain to cut in when local wears off. :-(
How many stitches? Last time I did something like that there was no blood at all but I had to get 4 or 5 stitches which were so well done that they had unravelled a few minutes after I got home .The sling is a waste of time .I threw mine off so I could drive home .It's required by A+E to make sure you keep your arm up but serves little purpose . That was the third time there .First time a socket slipped when undoing a wheel nut on a car I was scrapping and my hand smacked in to the rusty wing .Next time a saw slipped across a floorboard right across the back of my hand . Last time I poked around in the sink and "found" a piece of wineglass that I had missed when picking out the broken pieces ...
You need to watch those "Jetcut" saws. They seem to be made by welding whole lines of surgical scalpels together. At the time they cut you, there's no sensation at all. A few seconds later and it's blood everywhere and pain in bucketloads.
Standard builder/joiner injury - I reckon most have scars there. I was 'lucky' when I did it in that in my case the saw bounced as the full length of the blade travelled across the back of my hand, resulting in 4 moderately small parallel gashes rather than 1 extremely large one. Lots of blood but fortunately no trip to A&E for me.
About 30 years ago my dad managed to run a saw across his left wrist when it jumped out of the wood. Rather than heading for A&E he got my brother to hold things while he sewed himself up one handed.
He was one of the old school GPs, and having trained in surgery he was quite happy to d-i-y it (and had the sewing materials to hand).
OUCH, I've done that. I also smashed an old yoilet, slipped and sliced through my hand. Another time I was cutting a pipe behind a sink and slipped before cutting through the top of my thumb! Casualty departments get busy around Bank Holidays usually.
I saw one programme on TV were a man was using a sort of circular saw to cut wood. He brought it down as he turned to answer his mate and nearly cut his hand off. It was a right mess, they walked him to the ambulance with the saw!
Much of the later development of superglue came from the Americans wanting something faster than stitching for repairing wounds during the Vietnam war, for which they used superglue. It's commonly used in hospitals now, although sterile tubes of it cost much more than what you pay in WHSmiths. I don't know what factors are used to decide between stitching, superglue, or plaster/steristrips on a case by case basis. My brother had his hand superglued back together some years ago in A&E after cutting it (I can't remember if that was when he came off his bike, or when he got a nasty cut on some broken glass).
I've had 5 stictches in my wrist due to a new stanley blade cutting through some plastic rather quicker than I was expecting.
5 in my finger, lengthwise from palm to middle knuckle due to broken glass (a swift and painful infection ensued from this one, which bizzarely, affected my right shin and it took 4 X 28 day courses of anti-b's to shift it)
4 stiches in my head, in the shape of a letter Y, due to falling off a roof and cracking it on the corner of a skip.
4 in my chin, which came out when I shaved the same night.
The front of my nose removed on two occasions, once due to an unseen rock underwater in Zakynthos.
Black fingernails surgically removed 3 times: 1) cast iron manhole cover,
2) steel framed window, 3) hammer. and once accidentally with a 230mm diamond disk.
I've fell from 3 storey ladders twice, two storey ladders about half a dozen times and off single storey buildings (extensions, sheds, carports etc) more times than I can remember, most times i was fairly uninjured exept for the time I fell off a single storey ladder, only about 7 ft off the ground but landed in a rose bush/thing which was growing up the wall...about 200 different scratches and every one of them went septic.
cuts nowadays I don't even bother going to A&E with, unless it won't stop bleeding or it obviously needs more than one or two stitches.
Gee whizz, you lot frighten me. I climb, sail, done a major house rebuild, have extended my garage and am building a new workshop at the moment .... and in 50 years of doing all this (climbing started at
16), I've fallen off a rock face twice - once in Spain, once in Turkey
- and lost a thumb nail once to a hammer.
Either I'm a bloody sight more careful than you lot, or I'm going to have an extremely unpleasant last few years catching up with you lot if you represent the average.
But today reminded me of the four stitches in the palm of my right hand, done about 25 years ago, needed by my hitting a scored ceramic tile in an attempt to make it break. Hint: Those small Japanese tiles are
*extremely* tough and, when they do eventually break, are very sharp.
Fell off a galvanised iron shed roof when I was young with mate. We were painting it with Army surplus brown and both trod on a wet bit and slipped off. It was a fine summer day and we were only wearing shorts and plimsoles. Our fall was broken by nettles and brambles but in our descent we dislodged the paint kettle which fell on us and the paint drum which bumped the adjoining beehive. Most bees were out but enough were still around to make life uncomfortable but by a stroke of good luck there was a swimming pool 30 yards away belonging to a school so a leap over the hedge saw us in it. God knows what the caretaker thought when he found the remnants of the paint in the filter system.
Cycled home covered with stings both Nettle and Bee, lacerations, bruised head and a complexion like an army truck.
Parents were both upset, mother because she thought I might die, Dad being more realistic was calculating how much Swarfega etc was needed to get the paint off.
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