I Shoulda Paid the Kid
Our next door neighbor has a 12 year old kid. He wants to cut our grass for us. He wants to charge us $20. That’s about $19 more than I want to pay him, so I just do it myself instead.
However, in my quest to save $20, I ended up spending $250.
Saturday evening, I was minding my own business, weed whacking my back yard. I had not received the memo that humongous garden spiders now owned my back yard. I quickly ran face-first into a huge web strung between two trees.
Like most people, my first reaction to running into a spider web was to flail wildly in a manner that would make my neighbors call the police. However, my first swipe to remove the web from my face resulted in me getting my left ring finger caught momentarily in the motor of the weedeater.
Naturally, I pulled away quickly, leaving a nice chunk of my finger in the weedeater’s motor. Unlike a lot of cuts that don’t really bleed right away, this one immediately began spurting blood everywhere. I decided I should take a break and find some soap so I could assess the damage.
After running some water over the wound, I could see that I had managed to take a complete chunk out of the finger, all the way down to the soft tissue. There was no skin left remaining, so going to the hospital for stitches would have been futile. It wasn’t a large enough area to get a skin graft, so the best the hospital could have done was clean it out and wrap it… which I was fully capable of doing myself.
I washed it with soap and water, which didn’t feel good, then I dunked it in hydrogen peroxide, which felt like I had dunked it into an open flame. I didn’t learn until the next day that using peroxide on a wound with exposed soft tissue is the biological equivalent to pouring hydrochloric acid on it. Ouch.
I put about half a tube of Neosporin on it and wrapped it up, then went back to cutting my grass. I even played bass at church Sunday morning in spite of the fact that it was swollen, throbbing, and was still bleeding steadily.
In the back of my mind I knew I needed to go get a tetanus booster, since I hadn’t had one in about 12 years, but I told myself I’d cleaned it well enough. My mother talked me into it yesterday, so first thing today, I went and got an Adacel booster.
Now my arm feels like someone punched me with brass knuckles. But that’s good, it distracts me from the pain of my original wound.
For $20, I could have paid the kid next door to cut the grass and saved myself the doctor bill.
Monday, September 29th, 2008
