| 055 | Chain Saw Massacre | 2009-03-11 |
Saturday I was cutting wood in the back yard and tried to cut my toe off, hence the title.
My wife and I were busying ourselves at sawing a splitting wood we had collected from trees that were cut down in the neighborhood. We try hard to use every piece and I was using the saw to cut some particularly gnarly chunks that would never split. I hadn’t changed into my steel toed boots because I was just playing for a few minutes, but then Amy joined me and it turned into a couple of hours of work.
As my wife were splitting wood, I was working with the saw. Using my feet I would hold the odd shaped pieces secure. That’s when it happened, the saw was not going through a really tough piece and I applied even more muscle to force it through the wood. Suddenly the bar zipped through the log chunk and into my poor shoe. Instinctively I pulled the saw up and released the trigger. Thanks to good reflexes I didn’t cut my toe off, I just wounded myself. I guess if my reflexes had been even better, I wouldn’t have cut myself at all.
My wife immediately asked what was wrong, and I confessed. She didn’t scold me, she just told me to take off my shoe so she could see. After drawing a bucket of water for me to wash up in, she went after the first aid supplies. When she returned I was cleaning the wound. She looked at it and I thought she was going to faint. Now my wife is one tough little girl and it really surprised me when she acted so timidly. Judging from her reaction, I was instantly afraid that maybe I had been viewing the injury with rosy tinted glasses causing it not to look as serious to me. Seconds later she snapped back into service, supervising the cleaning and then dressing the cuts.
So I hobbled around for a few days, just happy to still have a big toe. I wasn’t able to run, as even walking agitated the parallel cuts and made them bleed again. The next day I went to a friends house to help top a large hack-berry tree. I had to confess up to my injury.
My wife, who knows me too well, asked, "did you tell them the truth?" I said, "yes", but I was so happy I avoided a tragedy, that I was due for some ribbing. My friends were easy on me. Lesson learned, even for an old dog.