On the tip of my right thumb
There is a circular mark. It’s about the size of the head of a pin, and it is the result of function testing an air brad nailer without disconnecting the air.
The nail went through the tip of the thumb and out through the nail. I said some bad words. This has been… thirty years ago? Anyway, the nail won’t ever grow properly again, but the little callous that forms on the scar is like a stylus for my smartphone.
I’m not suggesting everyone do this, but it has been a convenience to me.
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You’re like a transhuman or somethin’. Freaky.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
A friend of mine (now passed on) was in the large wooden crate business. Worked in an old building with wooden floors.
One day he dropped a large air nail gun on on his foot and nailed his foot to the wood floor. He had bypassed the safety so he could “walk” the gun down a crate and around the corners without the safety slowing him down.
I asked him how much it hurt and he replied “Not as bad as when I had to stretch way out to get a claw hammer and board to pull it out of my foot.”
Tough old buzzard. I’ll miss him…
And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose
Reminds me of when I missed a 16p nail with a 24-oz framing hammer one hot day when I was 17.
The nail on my left forefinger is still split down the middle from where I damaged the nail bed, nearly 40 years ago.
This is now #4,931 on the list of Things That Hurt. (The “nail through the foot” is #4,932, and “acquiring tools to REMOVE nail through foot” is #4,933.)
Lol.
Back in electronics school my left thumb found its way into the airgap between a RF source and what that source thought was ground. That lesson was “burned” into my memory forever.
May of last year I was shooting an IDPA major on staff day.
I reset a big steel pepper popper (weighs close to 40 pounds) then walked behind it to reset the moving target it activated.
As I did so the popper fell back over and the to edge clipped the inside of my left ankle. In seconds the ankle was swollen to the same size as my knee with a hematoma.
I shot three more stages on it and worked as a SO the next day. When it still hurt on the third day I went to the doc in the box. X-ray didn’t show a break so they put me in a boot and sent me on my way.
A week later I still couldn’t put any weight at all on it without the boot so I went to an orthopedist. He ordered a MRI which showed I’d cracked the bone.
Now over a year later I still have a brown spot where the injury was and it can get sore if I’m on my feet alot.
Your story tells me that these lingering symptoms may be there for many years to come.
I heard one about a guy building a house who nailed his foot to the subfloor. The crew had heard the warning about not removing the nail unless necessary, so they cut a chunk of plywood out of the floor and hauled him to the emergency room, where one of the medical staff, who had never heard of air nailers, asked him, “Why did you keep hitting it?”