A Painful Mishap

It was an unremarkable afternoon; nothing at all was unusual. Aaron, my husband, had just come home from work and was relaxing on the couch. I was in the kitchen preparing dinner. It was a Monday, or perhaps a Tuesday. It really could have been any day of the week as all of the usual pieces of my life were in just all the usual places. Everything except one piece, and that one item sitting in its wrong place was about to change everything. 

I brought the carrots out of the refrigerator and reached for my favorite J.A. Henckel’s chef knife. To my slight surprise, it wasn’t in its usual home, sitting with its knife friends in its convenient hardwood knife block. That’s right, I remembered, I had washed it and it was drying in the lower rack of the dishwasher. What happened next turned my very ordinary day into one of the most painful experiences of my life. You see, the chef’s knife is very sharp, but many things in a modern kitchen are sharp -- Including the curved steel blades of my Ninja Master Prep professional blender. 

I had washed the many components of my Ninja blender earlier in the afternoon, or maybe the previous evening. I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter because at the moment I was reaching for my chef’s knife in the lower basket of the dishwasher. The curved Ninja blades were resting on the dishwasher’s top rack, hanging dangerously down, extending below the bottom of the top rack. 

I could see the top handle of my chef’s knife and reached for it. The day was so ordinary and the knife handle so familiar, that nothing at all alerted me to the danger and emergency I was about to find myself in. My fingers wrapped themselves around the handle and felt all the usual curves and surfaces. I casually turned my attention back to my waiting vegetables as I withdrew my hand and knife from the bottom of the dishwasher. Effortlessly my hand rose, up and up  toward the small curved steel blade waiting, unbeknownst to me, hanging from the top rack. 

The incision began on the top midway of my right hand between the knuckle and joint of the proximal phalanx (index finger). It happened so quickly, I didn’t realize what was happening. Now I know. As I nonchalantly pulled my hand back from the dishwasher, the Ninja blade’s curved tip was pointing at my approaching hand. It made contact and began to slice open my skin, blood vessels, and other tissues along the length of my finger. When the pain finally reached my brain, it was sharp, and focused like a laser. The knife fell involuntarily from my hand coming to rest, luckily, almost exactly where it had been a moment earlier in the dishwasher. My mouth uttered a flavorful and vulgar word, a word that nearly never escapes my lips. So rarely do I utter such vulgarity that it was the word that caught my husband’s attention and not the clickity clack sounds of the kitchen. 

By the time Aaron appeared in the kitchen, my left hand was gripping my right. He had served in the Marine Corps and his basic medical training came to him naturally. He knew he had to stop the bleeding so he fashioned a quick bandage with a few paper towels and then ran for the first aid kit. Once the first aid kit was at hand, he was ready to take a look at the wound and figure out what to do. 

His face was caring but there was no denying that the wound was too deep and too long to be handled with his $9.47 Johnson and Johnson 125 piece first aid kit. I told him I didn’t want to go to the Emergency Room. He knew we had to go; I knew we had to go, but I said I didn’t want to go and looked to him to make it better. 

Aaron agreed to call the nurse hotline; he knew what the nurse would say, but I wasn’t mentally ready to go to the ER;  however the 25 to 30 minutes it took to call the nurse was what I needed to accept the situation for what it was.

The ER was full of emergent and non-emergent medical cases: seniors having trouble with breathing, people bleeding from their arms, kids with coughs and etc.. The hospital staff said our wait would be at least two hours, Aaron being impatient, he put our name in and took me right back to the car. “Let’s go to Urgent Care” he told me, and away we went. 

At the Urgent Care Clinic, I was introduced to the Nurse Practitioner and she put my finger in some kind of a solution while we talked about what happened and what was about to happen. She had to suture my wound and she would need to numb my throbbing finger; she made me feel comfortable and did her best to put me at ease. I realized at the time that slicing your finger on blender blades is painful, but it’s over before you know it, and there is no feeling of dreadful anticipation. I would agree to have every finger sliced by a blender blade before I would voluntarily go back to have a finger numbed. 

The medic positioned my hand and brought out her equipment: sterile towels, gauze pads, syringe, needle, and anesthetic. She positioned the needle and began to insert it, it was a sharp and painful sensation as the needle advanced beneath my skin into my hand. The comfort and support of the rest of my body that is comfortably resting in a padded supportive chair felt like a million miles away from the nerves in my hand. They were screaming out for relief, begging my brain to order my arm to pull back and relieve my hand from its torturous experience. 

I turned to Aaron as my eyes filled with tears; I cried out and looked plaintively to him for help, but the help I really needed was the digital block. The excruciating pain I felt was inseparable from the care I needed and there was nothing for Aaron to do but to hold and reassure me, and having him there did make me feel better. 

A proper digital block involves three injections and I endured all three. Each one is a painful and unwanted lesson in paying close attention to the hidden dangers of a modern kitchen. 

By the time the medic was suturing the wound, my hand was numb, and the pain was just a scary memory. She used so much anesthesia that when I looked at Aaron, I couldn’t feel anything the medic was doing to my finger; I was bandaged up and sent home with 11 stitches. 

It was an accident and accidents can be painful, but medical treatment can be worse. I will always remember that harrowing experience and it will always help me relate to my future patients.