My Own Worst Enemy

I never really planned on putting any current personal life stuff up here. I guess the wedding post will be posted only because of demand. But this story is too funny or idiotic not to mention.

It was Saturday morning, around 10am on 21 May. My new mountain bike was assembled and I needed to pump some air into it with my brand new bike pump. In order to use it, I had to cut a thick zip tie that held the air hose to the main shaft of the bike pump. I was going to use my needle-nosed pliers which have wire snips at the joint, but there wasn’t enough space in the zip tie to slip the pliers up in there and cut. So I grabbed my big ass CRKT knife and began my cut. And that’s when my common sense left the building. The knife snapped through the zip tie and into the meat between my left thumb and forefinger. I looked at the cut, it was weird. It wasn’t a slice, but rather a huge gap. I was baffled by the appearance of the injury but stopped caring when blood poured out of the wound like a faucet. It was dark and didn’t spurt so I knew it wasn’t an artery. But it was pouring all over the floor. I clamped down on it with my right hand and held it tight with pressure to stop the bleeding and went into my TA-50 room. All the single lieutenants in Germany live in at least a 3 bedroom apartment. And one of these rooms ends up housing all of our gear. It takes an entire room to hold all the crap we’re issued.

My left hand was completely covered solid with blood but at least it stopped dripping. I found my body armor leaning up against the wall and opened my medic pouch. In it were 2 field dressings. Not those bad ass new Israeli field dressings we were issued in Iraq that convert into a tourniquet. These were the old school field dressings. The thick white pads with two long wraps on either side. I grabbed a field dressing with my left hand while my right was still clamped down and walked to the kitchen. Over the sink, I brought my left hand to my mouth and opened the plastic with my teeth.

Well. You’re gonna need your right hand to apply this dressing.

I let go of the wound and grabbed the dressing. The wound was still gaping. I stared into the hole at a white cord. It was was my tendon from my thumb. Suddenly, blood spurted out of my hand and all over my dishes. Blood landed on my dish drying rack. Oh man! Not my clean dishes. Dammit. Blood splattered on my coffee machine and my blender and just poured onto all my dirty dishes in the sink as I spread out the dressing. Man this is gonna suck to clean up.

I wrapped the wound with my right hand as I held one end of the wrap with my teeth. I tied 2 over-hand knots and looked around for my car keys. I had to drive to post to get this stitched up. Well I can’t drive manual like this so the old BMW hooptie is out of the question. I grabbed my Pathfinder keys, my cell phone and my military ID and headed outside. I tried to figure out if I had lost too much blood and if it was dangerous to be driving a vehicle. What the heck do I know about that? Well, I don’t feel dizzy so I guess I’m fine. If I start to feel dizzy, I’ll just pull over and call someone. The reason I hadn’t called anyone yet was because 1) this was stupid and didn’t seem to be a crisis and 2) this was quicker my way. I didn’t want to wait for someone to show up.

As I drove to post, I called Sarah to find out if she thought I should go to the hospital in Amberg or if the clinic was capable of stitching me up, or if they were even open on Saturdays. She wasn’t sure but fortunately, the clinic was open from 0900-1200 on Saturdays. A major sat me in a treatment room and said he’d be back. Apparently there were a lot of patients and he was busy. Thus far, I had not felt any pain. He came back ten minutes later to look at the wound.

“Who put this field dressing on?” He asked.
“I did.”
“That’s pretty good.”

He cut the dressing off and poked around with one of those long thick cotton swabs. He lifted the skin and poked under the white tendon. Blood came out in little puddles.

“The tendon is still intact. You're very lucky. You just severed some veins and cut maybe an artery.”

“Hey Doc. What if I had just left the dressing on and didn’t get this stitched up? Would I just have a nasty scar? Would I be fine otherwise?” I asked.

“As long as it didn’t get infected, you would be fine except for a killer scar. See all this space under the tendon?” He pushed the tendon towards one side as I peered into the hole. It was in fact very spacious down in there. Not at all like what I had expected. “It’s easy for an infection to set in there.” I was comforted by what I heard though.

“Irrigate this with 2 liters of water. I’ll be back. I have to see another patient.”

He left me in the hands of a specialist who began pouring sterile water into the gap with a big plastic syringe. And that’s when it finally hurt. Oh god did it hurt. For the first time, I had to look away. I suddenly felt real cold and sweat started pouring down my forehead. My head was running like a faucet, I rubbed my forehead against the sleeves of my t-shirt. I looked at my forearms. The hair was completely matted down and my arms were drenched. I completely soaked through my t-shirt in minutes. Sweat dripped off of my 4 fingertips faster than I’ve ever seen before.

“I think I’m going to puke.” I said. The specialist grabbed a garbage can and pulled it up to me.

“You’ll feel better after you do. A guy cut off his finger three days ago and we went through this exact same stuff before we re-attached it,” he said to me. "After he puked, he felt better."


"I don't want to puke. I don't like puking."

“Ok, maybe 1 liter will do it. “ And with that he stopped.

The doctor came back. “I am going to anesthetize the wound and then we will stitch it up. It will feel like a pinch, and then a burn as the anesthetic spreads. This will be the only time it’s going to hurt.”

Besides the irrigating part.

He stabbed at the open flesh three times with a needle, each time pumping some juice into my hand. I felt the pinch, and it did hurt. But I never felt the burn.

Now I was feeling better again and I watched closely as he put in the first 5 sutures. He let the specialist put in the last two for practice. He did the first one well, but he had to poke into the fascia a few times with the needle before he got a good grip on the flesh. They closed me up and I was on my way home in no time.

I went home and dreaded cleaning up all the blood. Blood doesn’t come out that easily. I reminded myself to get more field dressings from Doc. Those things are handy and soak up buttloads of blood. I issued myself a “No Knives” profile for a week, effective immediately.

I asked Doc Ledlow later how venous blood spurted if there was no pressure. He said if you clamp down on the wound, sometimes the vein clots up a bit and pressure builds up that will give off a few good spurts.

The funny thing about all of this is, 5 days prior to this incident, I was at the bar with my buddy CPT Lawrence and one of the FNGs, Keith Wei. After too many shots of tequila, I tried to do a handstand out in the parking lot. As it turns out, I don’t know how to do a handstand, nor did I ever. As I bent over to get up on my hands, I immediately fell down and landed on the bridge of my nose and the left part of my forehead. Explaining that one at work Wednesday was fun. And now the bandage on my hand this past Monday morning. I managed to come out of Iraq practically unscathed. And now, I’ve injured myself more in the past week than any terrorist has in an entire year. That’s hilarious. And I’m an idiot.

Since I’ll be in Croatia with Boggiano this weekend, I’ll be cutting the sutures out myself. Doc Ledlow(holding his baby in the “Unstoppable” video) taught me how to remove sutures. How hard can it be?