Yesterday my brother and his fiancee were over at our place for dinner with wine. Afterwards we were going out and thought that we should take the empty bottles with us since we were passing the recycling cabin anyway. While there my brother threw a bottle hard into the glass bin to make it crash. Unfortunately, part of the bottle ricocheted back up and came straight for me. Instinctive I put up my hand to protect my body from the whirring glass, and it hit my right ring finger.

And there were blood – lots of it. In fact, I even had an arch of blood across my face, going all the way into my right ear. The floor in the recycling cabin had blood splattered on an area about two meters wide.

We rushed back into the apartment, pressing the finger together, putting three compresses and a makeshift tourniquet made of tape while M called for a taxi.

After arriving at the emergency room at the hospital, I only had to wait for about 5 minutes before getting my hand looked at. After removing the bloody compresses and cleaning the wound with salt water they cut off the blood flow with a rubber tube and a peang. Prodding the finger with what looked like toothpicks, the conclusion was that I had lost feeling in about half my finger. After two anesthesia shots in the finger (that really hurt), I soon didn’t feel anything at all.

Despite the nerve damage they had to close the finger to stop the bleeding, so they started to sew. It was a really odd sensation to see them doing it and not feel any pain. After 10 stitches they released the peang to let the blood through the finger, but immediately had to put another two stitches due to leakage.

The people who closed up my finger were really nice, and we even had a few laughs together.

After getting my stitches it was time to  x-ray the finger to look for skeletal damage (since the cut was so deep). For some reason this was considered a really high prio case, I got to go before people who had been waiting for several hours. Anyway, the x-ray turned out fine and the glass hadn’t damaged the bone.

A quick bandage and a tetanus shot later and I was on my way home again. Total time in the hospital was just above three hours, which was probably a new record for me.

Today the finger hurts quite a bit, and I will soon go the pharmacy to get the pain killers and antibiotics that I got prescriptions for.

Tomorrow I will have to go to another hospital, where a specialist in hand surgery will assess the damage and possibly open the finger up again to try to repair the damaged nerve(s).

Now, time for some (quite gory) pictures: