Hello & Good Morning!

[kdfrawg]

I am apparently confused enough without a one-eyed cat.   

Speaking of handicapped, my father cut his index and ring fingers off his right hand about ten years ago on a radial arm saw. Someone called me, and I finally caught up with him in a recovery room at the hospital. He had sitting on the edge of the bed when somebody handed him the phone. I made sure he was all right, then said that he was now going to be a little short-handed for the rest of his life. He started to laugh real hard, and had lost enough blood that he fainted.

The nurse was not amused.

[Diane Amberg]

 Bad, Kermit, very bad       How did he amputate those two fingers and not the middle one also?

[Teresa]

He needed the middle one for sign language when he drives..

[kdfrawg]

He stopped the saw blade in time. He has phenomenal reaction times. I inherited those. In fact, having those slow down a bit was my first sign of MS. The story of the lot fingers itself is interesting.

My father built dollhouses, very accurate dollhouses. In fact, they were so lifelike that he made 1/2" to 1' dimension lumber and used it to frame the walls, then covered them with wood veneers or similar materials. Same with the roofs. Have you ever seen hand-carved 1/2" to 1' scale toilets, toilet paper rolls, and chandeliers? He made them. I will post some photos of an architectural model that he and I made, 1/4" to 1'.

The day he cut his fingers off, he was a few floor joists short for the second floor of my sister-in-laws dollhouse. My brother had borrowed his Dremel table saw, so he was back to cutting them on his 8" DeWalt radial arm saw, which is, incidentally, exactly as old as I am. The blade bit too hard while he was cutting scale 2 x 10s and pulled it into his hand, cutting off those two fingers before he could pull it back.

The fingers, of course, had gone around inside the guard and been spit out the hole the sawdust usually came out of. He dug around in the sawdust and picked them up, then wrapped his hand in an orange mechanics rag and went up to the kitchen. My mother, who was reading a book, asked if he needed anything. He said he did not, but that he need to go out for a few minutes. He dropped some ice cubes into a seal-able sandwich bag and dropped the fingers in on top of them. He wrapped a dish towel around over the now-soaked mechanics rag. He then went down to the van and drove eight miles to the nearest hospital.

It is frightening how much of me is inherited from my father. I don't much notice it until I think about the weird stuff he has done, then remember those of my own. He says the same about me. In fact, he has often said, "Like son, like father." Then again, he has often said he had three children, one of each kind. He has never answered the follow-up question.

[Diane Amberg]

 I gather his accident was some time ago. Did they reattach the fingers?

[kdfrawg]

They were too mangled up by their trip through the blade guard, where the clearance was only about 3/8 of an inch. Like me, he has big hands with big fingers, so that trip pretty well pulverized them. He is a determined man, though. He finished that doll house and built two more that he had promised, even though he is right-handed. And within a year, he had his beautiful penmanship almost back to where it was.

[Teresa]

Wow.. and I gripe because my hands and arms ache a little bit.

Makes me feel pretty petty......

[Teresa]

Goodnight ...

[Janet Harrington]

Wow.. and I gripe because my hands and arms ache a little bit.

Makes me feel pretty petty......

Yeah, okay.

[Teresa]

What do you mean.. Yeah..okay.
what kind of response is that?

I DO feel pretty pathetic when I moan and groan about  my back aches and I have a headache and yada yada yada...
And when you hear about someone who has no hands or legs or fingers or who has a life threateneing disease..
then I stop to think that how lucky I am to have all of my everything and my health.

THAT is what I was talking about..
Jeepers.. I can't believe that you gave that old 'yeah,okay' answer.
That was lame..