Charlie Bit My Finger!
There was a very cute YouTube video a few years ago with a little boy playing with his infant brother, Charlie. Age one point, Charlie chomps down on the older boy’s finger to the point of sufficient pain to have him howl to his mum that “Charlie bit my finger!” in the best of British accented style. Well, today, I am typing on my iPad with 9 fingers since my left thumb is wrapped in gauze and medical tape. Charlie didn’t bite my finger, but I managed to bite my own finger, quite badly.
I am spending this week balancing and pacing my expert witness work on two cases, one new one and one recently rejuvenated one. I have to make progress on both with deadlines looming towards the end of the month on both of them. The rejuvenated one I have a 70-page draft report I wrote in December that will need to be edited down to size and touched up. It has required me to bone up on the very technical issues it entails (it is about CDOs and CMBS of the biggest sort). I’m anxiously awaiting the suggested edits form the lawyers and then I will get to it. The other case is a new one for which I need to generate an experts report in the next two or so weeks, so a relatively short hop. The good news is that it is a far less technical case in an arena that is far more central to my experience since it is about the underperformance and alleged breach of fiduciary duty for a defined contribution plan or significant size. It is a class action suit and from my initial review of the facts, there dose seem to be some pretty significant underperformance that went unattended to for the better part of a decade. That case and report seems on strong ground and has made a significant difference in the participants’ retirement income security…in the cumulative and composite amounts that will likely be in the $ billions. The data crunching for the exercise seems to be significant, but I feel I can write most of the report and plug in the data output at the very end.
The game I am playing is to balance and time my work waiting for input from the lawyers and eventually the number crunchers on our team. As the weather is now getting more summer-like, I am inclined to do some garden work to get my property looking its best for when my granddaughters get here in three weeks. So, I am using the physicality of my gardening to balance the focus and diligence of my desk work doing the reading, analysis and writing for the two cases. Don’t get me wrong, I’m putting in 7-10 hours of work, but I have a waking span of almost 16 hours, so I figure doing a few hours of yard work is a good use of time. Today, I decided that what needed doing was to use the string trimmer on the lower play area since the expanse of Alyssum is getting a bit long of tooth and will look cleaner if it gets mowed down. I also noticed that while I did most of the pruning last week and over the weekend, that there are a few more spots in the front that would benefit from some cleaning up.
After doing all the string trimming, I started in on the Crassula (Miniature pine tree plant) succulents along the driveway. While I was at it, I wanted to clean u=out some of the remaining messy tree Aeoniums in that area. I have found that while I can do that pruning with a good pair of sheers, it is faster and more efficient with succulents and native plants to use a Japanese handheld sickle that is a very sharp J-shaped blade that is great for trimming bushy plants without breaking out the electric hedge trimmers. I was feeling pretty good about this new tool since it is very simple and very effective. I used it all over the back hillside shrubs and it worked great. Indeed, it took care of the Crassula and Aeoniums with great dispatch and almost filled an entire green waste bin with trimmings. Before going to get the blower to tidy up the bits and pieces, I noticed that there were some shaggy-looking lavender bushes along the pathway to the play area. I love the lavender plants because they are both fragrant and colorful with their purple-topped stalks at this time of year. But those flowers fade as they all do and I had already trimmed up all those up in the side garden, so why not take care of these while I had all my equipment downhill.
One of the things I noted when I first started using this new Japanese sickle, was that using this tool is like using a straight razor instead of a safety razor or electric razor. You need to keep your wits about you. I specifically remember telling myself to only use the tool when I was fresh and not too tired to properly control my muscles. There is no doubt that when I get weary, I get looser and more casual wielding my tools. I had already put in a few hours with the string trimmer and the sickle and I could tell my arm muscles were getting fatigued. I stopped for a rest when Melisa, Faraj and Yasuko came by for a meeting with Kim about the upcoming Garden Club event this Friday, where we will be making Kokedama at Melisa’s direction, hosted by Kim here and catered in Japanese fashion by Yasuko. When Faraj took off, I donned my gloves and went back to work on the lavender. I was most of the way done and obviously was getting a bit too fatigued for my own good. It only took one errant swing of the Japanese sickle to slice through my gloved hand and take off the top of my left thumb.
There is no delayed reaction involved in this sort of injury. I knew exactly what I had done right when I did it. I couldn’t tell how bad the damage was, but I could see the thumb of the glove sliced off and the blood starting to flow from my exposed digit. I took off the glove and used it to bandaged my clenched left fist and started off right away to the kitchen, wondering whether I would finally need to go to urgent care and get stitches, something I have managed to avoid my whole life. When I got to the kitchen, Kim and the others were sitting wondering what I was doing back in the house before they were finished. I decided to get dramatic and just said, “I cut off my finger”. I went straight to the sink and started running th water, knowing that putting my thumb under it would not feel great. As I took the glove off and unclenched my fist, I clenched another part of my body as the blood flowed freely down my hand as i ran cold water over it.
Melisa was a Search & Rescue Paramedic, so she took over and told me to hold a paper towel tightly onto my thumb while she looked to see how bad it was. Her initial prognosis was that it would not need urgent care, which was a relief. While Kim went looking for bandaging materials, Melisa had me sit down so I could keep my hand higher than my heart to stanch the blood loss. That’s when she told me I was getting “shocks”. The thing about shock is that it is a safety valve for the body and one rarely knows if they are going into shock. I certainly didn’t recognize the symptoms, but may have been a bit so while at the sink. At this point, while I was suggesting we not use peroxide and opting for antiseptic cream, which only stung a little, we bundled up the thumb in an entire roll of gauze, held together with electrical tape (since we were out of medical tape).
After a shower with a plastic bag on my left hand, I sat down to do the work I had put off on my iPad. The thumb was throbbing, but I suspected the bandage might have been too tight. When Kim came back from the pharmacy we decided to re-bandage the wound, so I got a good look at what was left of my thumb. I really did slice off a nice piece of it. Then Kim sprayed on the antiseptic (ouch!) followed by the spray-on bandage (triple-ouch!!!) and then we more loosely wrapped it. Right about now I am wishing that Charlie had bitten my finger rather than this.