Thumb Be Gone

In haste to trim some booklet faces on a hydraulic knife that strained not in slicing a two-inch stack of paper, I reached behind to compress the stack of booklets. As the clamp slammed down, it caught my perpendiculared thumb, squeezing off the nail and flesh on the final digit.

In the emergency room, the doctor looked at the thumb stub and the iced fleshed in a bowl. His assessment, morbid and humorous, was that re-attachment was useless since I had squeezed the life out of it.

It took six months for the thumb to grow back--an interesting experience as well as a reaffirmation of life and evolution. For five years, the thumb felt like someone holding a buzzer on it as it rang like a doorbell. Fortunately, it was my left thumb which is unnecessary for so-called ten-finger typing. Actually, you only need nine. The left-thumb is unnecessary.

Lucky I was that I did not smash the whole hand.