For weeks, Ian and his friend Chuck have been fixing up an old field cultivator that we were given, and last night he finally pulled it behind the tractor to prepare our garden for planting. The machinery still wasn’t working properly, so Ian asked me to come out and help. My job was to walk behind the tractor and encourage a mechanism on the field cultivator to turn as Ian went around the corner. We started out very slowly with visions of me falling down and being sliced up by the tines that were digging up the earth, but we never gave that an opportunity to happen. The first time I helped the mechanism turn, another piece of metal turned faster and came up and squashed my middle finger.
I shouted and went tearing across the field. When I got to the yard, I did not want to stop running, so I just ran in circles. I could feel something flopping off the injured hand, and I asked Ian to look at it because I was too afraid. He took one look and said, “We are going to the doctor.” This confirmed my worst fear, and it wasn’t until we were getting in the car that I found out it was not part of my finger that had been torn off, but just the nail. It was the entire nail, including the portion that usually sits under your skin.
As we drove to urgent care, I belted out hymns and folk songs and wiggled in my seat and stomped my feet because I thought that if I sat still I might throw up. The folks at the urgent care tried to stick my nail back inside my finger to give a new nail a chance to grow, but they could not do it. They said I have a week get someone to do that, and if no one can do it, then I might never have a fingernail on that finger. I am remembering this is a distinct possibility, but Ian said it sounded to him like I would probably eventually have a fingernail of some sort on that finger. It will likely be a weird looking nail –bumpy or discolored, but it will be a nail. What a shame that it is not my style to flip people the bird because I will have a unique instrument for that purpose.
The bone in my finger is also broken, and the skin is pretty sliced up. We spent so much time at the urgent care that my son had time to watch the whole Toy Story movie in the waiting room.
Back at home, I tried unsuccessfully to find a substitute for my Pilates class the next morning and then went to deal with the chicken that had been in the oven when I got hurt. The chicken was standing upright, balanced on a Coke can, just as I had left it, but in the intervening two hours it seemed to me like it had acquired more personality. I tried in vain to pull the Coke can out of its cavity, but my finger hurt too much, so I had to put it in the refrigerator as it was. It is still standing there bare naked like a cranky gnome.
I have no idea how we are going to keep up with things while my finger gets better. It hurts so much.
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