A. Aronsson’s WeBOLLog

A bit more than a month ago I cut my fingers, pretty deep, so now I lack feeling right above the cuts and from the center of the cut to the fingertip. The transition between normal feeling and no feeling is the same as when your arm or leg is asleep, a bit tingling and weird sensitivity.

A few odd things to do when you lack feeling in the fingers used are to:

• Cut your nails, you can’t tell if it’s the nail or the finger itself you’re cutting.
• Move a wet finger over a surface which is usually not slippery, it’s odd with less friction as you can’t feel that the finger is wet.
• Move a dry finger over something cold, and the finger feels slippery where you cannot feel the cold.
• Scratch your eye, as you can’t really feel if you would go into your eye… except when you do.
• Press any hard button, you can’t feel on the skin how hard you are pushing it.
• Gripping something heavy between the thumb and that finger, it feels like you only have a good grip with the thumb as you can’t feel the friction on the finger.
• Putting a CD on the finger is an odd sensation. It feels like it should fall off, because you can only feel it resting on one side of the finger, even though you know that it is not physically possible!
• When removing a piece of tape from the finger where some parts of the skin cannot feel it, the sensation is that those part of the skin peeled off with the tape! At least if you are not watching it.

Below is a video which includes footage of my poor fingers from shortly after I slipped with the knife to just a few days ago. Beware though, if you did not like the images in the previous post linked in the beginning, you wont like the video. It contains blood and open wounds, so if that does not suit you, don’t click play!

Hurt fingers greets healthy fingers.

Of course special situations awake ideas in my head. Hopefully my left index and long finger will feel better soon enough. Like, in six months.

Yesterday (2008-10-05) I managed to do a really clumsy thing. I had my brothers visiting playing Zack & Wiki (not new but awesome!) so I was a bit out of focus when I battled with separating frozen bread slices for us to eat, after they had been grilled. After chopping away with less sharp tools I carelessly decided I would use my Global bread knife I got for my 25th birthday last year. It worked fantastically well, even too well. I had of course applied way too much force as the row of frozen slices previously had seemed like a solid object, but now the knife went straight through, into my unsuspecting fingers.

The first few moments of shock is quite unsettling. The feeling of seeing huge gaping gashes in your fingers is completely unreal, until the blood starts gushing out and you realize you should like… try to stop it. I ran to the sink to not mess up my kitchen, but as I was getting lightheaded and felt like fainting I got some tissues under my hand and laid down on the floor instead.

I called out for my brothers so they could phone my father, that was my instinctual reaction. He later managed to arrange a time at the emergency watch, and an hour later I was sitting in the waiting room filling out the damage report. 40 minutes later I got into a room and they began cleaning up my hand before the doctor would arrive, which took another 20 minutes.

The doctor had me straighten my fingers which hurt a whole lot and sent a funky jolt of pain through my index finger. At first they did not deem my injury very serious as a lot of dried up blood made it hard to see, so they went to another patient while the anesthetic got to work.

They got back a while later and began sewing me up. She originally didn’t think it was very deep, but due to the blood pumping out of the cuts she changed her mind. Instead of her first suggested one stitch on my long finger she used four, and five stitches on my index finger! The anesthetic wasn’t completely working when she started sewing, but I wanted it over with, and after enduring three or four stitches I didn’t feel much anymore.

Now I’m home from work trying to take it easy. Just using my fingers a little is quite painful, but I did get a fair amount of sleep tonight. Painkillers woohoo!

You might have noticed the friendly images in the text, below are some of the bloody and scary images, so if you aren’t into that kind of stuff avoid clicking the links! I’ve also added a warning screen if you step through the images in the display system.

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WARNING

THE FOLLOWING IMAGES CONTAIN BLOOD & GORE!!
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!
IMG1 IMG2 IMG3 IMG4 IMG5 IMG6
END OF DANGER

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I have been careful when cutting things throughout my entire life, so I’m not quite sure how I got to this point. My guess is that it was a mix of distractions, stress and frustration. Distracted as the others were playing a video game, and I was interested in the puzzles, stress as I was already late preparing the food and we were very hungry, frustration as I couldn’t get the slices to separate! And when it comes down to it, I was not even trying to cut something, I was just going to separate them! Of course I’ve gotten many tips and ideas of how to separate frozen bread slices without damaging your fingers now, like I wont think twice the next time.

Recently I was skiing in Hundfjället, Sälen, Sweden.

I went into the second steepest slope there, as the steepest one (The Wall) was closed off for upcoming competitions; and as I fiddled with the camera which was attached to my right foot/leg, I didn’t see in which direction my friends turned at the bottom of the slope.

I saw the warning for a crest, but nothing told me which way to turn, so I turned directly towards the lift system… where the snow wasn’t prepared so I sank through the crust with the left ski (snowblade) which made me do a faceplant on the icy crust at high speed, pushing my glasses into my face and doing some friction damage. You were supposed to turn left instead, apparently.

Luckily only one ski sunk through, or my nose would probably not look very pretty (only the right side of my face hit the ground), and my neck might have gotten damaged. My continued rotation rotated me sideways, so there wasn’t much more damage done, but my shoulder and neck on my right side was stiff like concrete the day after :p

The most painful part of the injury was the damage on the inside of my lower lip, really annoying stuff :x

And here’s a video from the camera I messed with before going down the slope! The reason why it all happened.

2008-02-14

And with this the blog has its first content :) yay!