SOG Tellus FX Fixed Blade Knife

[Big Frank]

Diets are for quitters, Rastus. If the bleeding won't stop, it's time for help. Or if you can't breathe, are having a heart attack or a stroke. And don't sit there and smoke a cigarette and drink another beer before you call 911, like a deceased friend of mine did.

One good thing about living where I do is that the hospital is only a 3 minute drive away. 1.1 miles and a 25 minutes walk according to Google Maps. I've walked home from the ER before and don't think it took me that long, but the lack of sidewalks part of the way slowed me down. I was with one of my uncles in the U.P. when he had a heart attack. The hospital there was 10 times farther from his house than this hospital is from me, and the ambulance had to come from the hospital to get him, so that was a half hour round trip. He was DOA, but then again, he was likely dead before I got across the room to the phone.

My finger still looks like crap. It's blackish and bloody looking, but not dead, and the white spots are gone. I think there was too much moisture in the bandage and the skin was starting to break down.

[Rastus]

You need to air that thing out every day for a little while. 

I am 1/2 an hour from a paved highway.  Another 1/2 an hour to get to a podunk hospital. 

My oldest son cut the heck out of his finger and hand before...was scared like all get out I was going to tear him up (he was right) for playing with his knife. He super glued it back together....it worked. 

My youngest son likes really sharp knives...he got a high quality knife sharpening kit for his graduation gift.  So when he said be careful he meant it.  If for instance, if you were to let the knife fall on your thumb mindlessly and feel nothing you know you are about to become a sprinkler.  Ask me how I know.  And yes, the super glue worked for me too. 

[Big Frank]

Yeah, I keep it bandaged most of the time, with breathable band-aids, and let it air out a little without them.

Super glue never works for me when I'm bleeding, even just a little bit. But it's still useful  to glue together loose edges, and as an artificial scab to cover a wound and keep crap out while it heals. Unlike super glue, the stuff they use in hospitals isn't just sterile, it has antibiotics in it. One time some brain surgeons got sued because they were going down to the hardware store and buying Krazy Glue to stick people's brains back together. That's NOT the place you want to introduce non-sterile foreign substances!

[Big Frank]

The surgical glue was supposed to start falling off my finger in about 5 days, and it did so nothing was holding the wound closed. The good news is, I finally got a good look at it and I didn't cut myself half as bad as I thought. I was looking at dark lines in the glue before, thinking that's where the cut was, but it was closer to my fingertip and only 1/4" deep. I got a toothpick and dug the glue out around the edges until I got to fresh meat, which, as you can guess, didn't feel good at all. Then when it quit bleeding, I squirted super glue in and around it, working it in with a toothpick. Then I held a piece of waxed paper over and squeezed it all together, until it made a nice flat, smooth surface where the flap was sticking out. I had to redo it after I cut the dead edges off the flap, but it looks okay now, like it will start to heal right. But after it was sticking out for 5 days, it may not. Like Sarge said when I emailed him the pics the other day, "That's going to leave a mark." 

[Rastus]

It's a shame we don't heal like when we were 20 something.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

You got that right. I used to hit the ground and bounce back. I don't come up running anymore. Sometimes I can't even crawl right away. I tripped stepping over my trailer hitch while I was up north this summer. I pulled my arms up so my wrists or elbows didn't hit, closed my eyes and turned my head and ducked while I slammed into the ground. Surprisingly, I managed not to get hurt very much because I swan dived into the ground with my hands up by my head. I didn't have a lot of time to react when the toe of my shoe hooked on the trailer hitch, but it was enough. I think it was my cardiologist who asked if I've fallen in the last 6 months, a year, or whatever. I told him about it, and that didn't count as me losing my balance because I'm a senile old git. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)

I peeled off multiple layers of super glue and used nail clippers to cut the "sharp" edge off the skin flap tonight. A crescent 1/8" wide is just raw. After I wash it some more, I'll put a layer of glue on to scab it over. If it doesn't get caught on my blankets or anything, I probably won't [put a band-aid on it. I probably will before I work on anything dirty, like my guns.

[Big Frank]

How can you tell your finger is happy? When it smiles at you!    If it has a big, gaping, toothless grin every time you lock eyes with it, it must be happy, right? 

Well... no, actually. It's kind of an angry looking red finger, but the picture was so dark I had to do some editing to make the face show up better.