so here is my hand post accident, pre surgery, post surgery

it took me almost 2 years to even talk about this....ive mentioned in threads that i had this happen but didnt go into detail.....my wife said it might help me to talk it out with people. i dont have friends so i figured i would bat it around with all you....

i can get into particulars if asked a question but i will tell you that as soon as it happened i knew i lost it....i hit emergency stop on the saw and picked up my finger...i went to tell the foreman that was there(nobody with me....always worked alone) what happened and that i needed to go to the er...he said i had to go to the office first and fill out an accident report...i said hell no and told him to get me to the hospital. he flagged down someone walking the floor and they took me. i put my finger on the dash board on the way there and called my wife. i told her i had something to tell her and didnt want her to flip.....i told her and she flipped. she thought i was playing a crappy joke......nope...it happened...

everyone told me they dont see how i kept it together and walked out, talked on the phone, walked myself into the er......shock i guess...

what i didnt like was i was in the er for like an hour with my finger sitting on my lap. i thought they tried to save them....not mine.
after they did grab it they dumped it in a bag of ice. like directly on the ice...i thought you were supposed to put it in a bag and then in the ice...oh well. finger not viable....

the first set of pics are going to be post surgery......after that i will do pre surgery only because the pre surgery look worse......want to ease you into it.

here are the pics after surgery...like the next day

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so this is what it looked like right before i went in for the surgery...........these pics show a messed up hand/finger so skip it if you cant take it

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now i was a machinist but i worked for the lab...quality department....i was in the lab running a spectrometer before i took the job on the lathe.
i had a cnc, a benchtop lathe, a small furnace, 3 band saws, a table grinder, and a tinsile test machine...

my job from start to finish was to cut square bard from the keels on one of the band saws and then machine them to specs on the cnc so that i could run stress tests...strength, yield, and elongation as well as brinell hardness.
that was 90% of it but since i had the saws and the lathe, every now and then i would have to cut a couple pieces of a casting so they could look for a defect.
well this time there was a disaster...there was shrink somewhere in the casting and they couldnt find it so they wanted me to cut it up and find it for them.
a casting about the size of 2, 55 gallon drums next to each other, and then stacked on each other....it was a big boy.
so, i had someone cut that into 25 sections and from there i would cut each section into 15mm slices till i found the defect.

well it was bad from the start. they had a brinell hardness of about 280 which is super hard. i was blazing through saw blades. i didnt have shims to hold my parts in and they were walking right out of the vice.
normally it wouldnt be a big deal but this was critical....
they told them we were going to find the defect. if i made a cut through a defect and it was not clean, or if the blade was dull and my surface was wavy, we could miss the defect.....
anyway, i was trying to make somewhat precise cuts on parts that were walking away from me....on top of that i had 2 other saws going cutting test bars out of my regular keels, and i had the cnc going turning parts, and i had the furnace going.....

the previous day i worked from 4am until 6pm......i was back at midnight and at 10am it happened....thats when everything changed for me....

hope youre not too grossed out....

this is what i was cutting when i lost the finger



here are some of the pieces i already cut

a reply to: Grovit

Sorry about your injury. Mine wasn't as nasty, though in a sense it was to me (Back injury). People all to often forget that it can take only seconds to change future years.

Best of luck to you with your recovery. (I'd give ya the thumbs up, but that may just be rubbing it in...LOL)

Holey saw man, I can see from your photos and your story your reluctance to speak of this horrendous accident.
My god I can't believe the fact that your Boss wanted you to fill out forms and the ER department took
and hour to see you.

How are you making out now? Can you use that hand as in a work situation?
Thanks for sharing and sorry for my poorly worded post but this thread really shook me.

Best wishes,
Iwinder

That's brutal. I might have missed it, but is your left your dominant hand?

As long as it wasn't your beer hand mate, that's the important thing.
I hope you get compensated by your employer, that is way to many hours with only a 6 hour break.

Sweet Mother, those nasty cuts must have hurt like hell. It's been two years now, so how is the pain and movement in your hand coming along now? I bet it changed your life for sure. I hope things are beginning to improve for you.

a reply to: Iwinder

cant use my hand for too much...

it didnt take an hour to bee seen at the er...they got me back right away and got me on an iv, pain meds and all that but other than that i was just sitting there....it took about an hour for them to try to do something with my finger....

i can use my hand a little bit but i have no strength...no grip.....
i developed crps because of it...i get phantom pain all the time.....
im in pain every day......

they wanted to pput a spinal cord stimulator in my back but its not going to happen now.
i have not been to work since march of 2013.
i will probably start looking for work around next april. i dont know what i am going to be able to do...
i do little stuff around the house and try and tinker with my car, things like that but i dont do anything 8 hours a day....just gonna have to see what happens.

missing part of the bone from the middle finger too.....the tip of the stump is so sensative.....if i knock into it, it is almost unbearable.....my wife crocheted me a little stump cover i wear over it....i call it the nub glove.

i get pain all through my left arm up into the shoulder because of this......it is going to be a lifetime of pain and pain meds

originally posted by: weirdguy
As long as it wasn't your beer hand mate, that's the important thing.
I hope you get compensated by your employer, that is way to many hours with only a 6 hour break.

Correct you are Weirdguy, I don't desire to detract from this thread but here is one I authored awhile back
and I feel it may be of interest to the OP and others.

However it will not return the OP back to his usual self and I wish there was some way to do just that.
Here is my thread on Sleep Deprivation and I am not self promoting my thread its a close fit to the OP's thread.

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Regards, Iwinder

originally posted by: weirdguy
As long as it wasn't your beer hand mate, that's the important thing.
I hope you get compensated by your employer, that is way to many hours with only a 6 hour break.

shillington, no, i am right handed....thing is i have been a mechanic forever....then i got into machining...things like that. i need both hands and all my fingers...not sure what the prospects are going to be.....gonna wait till april and see what happens.

weirdguy, i got compensated........ive been at it since march of last year though...everything was a legal fight.....

we worked those kinds of hours all the time....i cant even count how many times i did 18 hour shifts....14 hour shifts 25-30 days in a row....happened all the time....

sometimes i would go in at 4am and work till 6pm.... back in at 2am and get off at 4pm...

crazy rotations like that all the time

a reply to: Iwinder

i never sleep well anymore....
i cant get comfortable in any 1 position very long.....i get woken up from pain....sometimes its my fingers or my bicep...

because of the crps i have a hard time regulating my body temp too. i am never just comfortable.....especially at night i go from hot to cold.....
some days are worse than others but it is never pain free.....
i will be sleeping and then like a brick the pain hits and then im up and it sucks...

a reply to: Grovit

Get well soon, I sincerely hope you're ok but ...

EWWWWWWWWW!

Those pics give me a cold shiver down my EWWWWWWWWW spine D:

Ruined my doritos ... Get well soon ... eww ... good luck ... can't unsee ...

Good luck ... much love ... eww ...

edit: I'm terrible at ignoring warnings lol thats why I stay off liveleak now. You must have balls of steel if I lopped a finger off I'd probably vomit myself to death. Are any of these pics recent? How has your hand healed up?

a reply to: Grovit

Grovit - that is horrendous, you poor thing. Your boss - what a loser. The emergency office - losers. It seems like everyone was incompetent all around. I'm so sorry for what you had to go through.

I'm wondering... I had read a little while ago for people suffering phantom pain that if they put a mirror against their missing body part that somehow it tricked the brain and it relieved the pain.

I wish there was something to say that would help. Is there something you can create to sleep with that cradles your hand and protects the injured parts? Kind of like a hand pillow of some sort?

Is there some type of disability work program in your area that may help you find work suited to you?

In the meantime if you ever need to talk I'm here.

Whooooo. That must have sucked. It was good that you kept it together. I have known at least a dozen people minimum that have lost fingers. It happens really quick. I worked in a flooring mill for a year and a half and my dad had worked there for about twenty years before he died. So I got to know a lot of people there when I was young. I got out of there with all my fingers. Four friends of mine since then took off a finger in various ways too, three with saws and one on a motorcycle chain.

It changes things, but you can learn to adapt to this over a period of time. My friends got used to it and it became a part of who they were after a while. They all kept on with their lives and it became only a minor inconvenience after a while. I hope you adapt to this new you and don't let it bother you too much. You won't be able to do everything you used to as easily but you will get used to living with it. One guy I know who cut two fingers off works on everything and flys a plane and now drives a school bus. He owned his own construction company for a long time till he decided to retire from that. It was just an inconvenience.

I did a lot of carpenter work in my life, building houses and doing lots of construction. I got a lot of slivers in my left index finger one time and there were red streaks running up my arm. I went to the doctors the day after I got them and he removed seven more slivers and told me that if it didn't heal he would have to take it off. I said, you might have to take my finger off, he said no and pointed at the streaks by my wrist and told me he will have to have them take off my hand. Three pills at a hundred and ten bucks and three days later, and the infection was gone. Thank god for that. I do believe in doctors, but not the ones who try to push pills on you for long term use. I would rather that they informed me what I could correct in my diet to fix things.

You poor Dear!! I wonder if you would be able to get on disability? You really need two hands to work. Might be worth a try because it will be hard to get hired with limited use of one hand. I know what it is like to be in pain every day so I can relate on that level. I do wish you all the best!

a reply to: Grovit

First of good luck with your recovery , i don't know a lot about phantom pain but it must really suck to have pain in something that is not there . But what alarms me is the hours you had worked prior to this happening . One is assuming that you are in the USA . If that was to happen in Australia the company you work for would be up against huge fines and possibly jail time for anyone up to the CEO. Speedy recovery ,hope all goes well .

a reply to: hutch622

I found those hours shocking and inhumane!!

Im sending good thoughts your way so sorry this has happened to you...you dont have to set a date for work just stay in the present and when you feel its time ...I.E. YOUR time you will know...I hope you have a speedy recovery and OUCH those friggin ppl at your work and hospital did not have your back...ppl are lame as sh8it at the most crucial times...#$%^ them all...thanks for sharing...TRULY SHELLS4U

a reply to: Grovit
Sorry to see that happen to anyone.

What country are you in?.... Do they have any OHS Laws?
What PPE were you wearing (or were provided with) at the time?
Did you receive any specific training when you changed jobs (tasks?)
Was the guarding on the machines up to standard?
And I would bet that you have had to fight the business tooth and nail to get any compensation etc...

The most poignant question would be, what steps were implemented (by the business) to prevent this happening to your replacement?

Unfortunately I see this kind of thing (and fatalities) all too often, and why?.....
1)Cant happen here
2)$$$$ - penny pinching

cant happen here

Hope things are on the up for you now mate. All the best.

a reply to: Night Star

I might be able to get disability once this is all the way over. I just signed the agreement and there is a 30 day hold. Then its over...i do need both my hands. Ive only ever worked in skilled trades so this puts me at bad odds.

belowlow, i have pics of it now but cant put them up till tomorrow. Dont have pics on my tablet.


Hutch, there are liabilities. I know the industrial commission violated them and fined them. I was arguing for a safety violation but signed their offer 2 days before the hearing. The phantom pain used to be the worst part but not anymore.
The hours and workload was crazy. I loved the work i did. I made good money but it was a hard place to work. Most new hires dont make it to their first check. The ones that do generally stay for years if they can avoid an injury. I can tell you some crazy # thats happened in that place.
This was the kind of place that you can never quite grasp how insane it is via pics. When people see what its like with their own eyes they dont even know how to process it. I was like that when i started.
Had i not been hurt i would still be there...i loved it...
Couple more years and i would have been back in the metal lab but i would have ran it.....those plans are gone

originally posted by: CovertAgenda
a reply to: Grovit
Sorry to see that happen to anyone.

What country are you in?.... Do they have any OHS Laws?
What PPE were you wearing (or were provided with) at the time?
Did you receive any specific training when you changed jobs (tasks?)
Was the guarding on the machines up to standard?
And I would bet that you have had to fight the business tooth and nail to get any compensation etc...

The most poignant question would be, what steps were implemented (by the business) to prevent this happening to your replacement?

In the states and we have osha laws.
I was trained on that particular saw for about 3 minutes. My boss showed me the controls and that was it.
At the time i had on metatarsels, safety glasses, and gloves off and on depending on what i was doing. When i had work related things in other parts i had to wear a hard hat, ear plugs, and full face respirator.
The guarding on the machine was the big issue. My lawyer showed me pics of it now. They added lights to it and several plexi glass guards. The safety violation was what we were getting ready to argue in court but we both signed papers so its not gonna happen.
I had to fight them every step of the way. From just about the very start they were sending me to doctors of their choice trying to refute what my doc and the independent docs were saying. They made me get prior authorization for certain meds and just wouldnt cover others.
They even made me go to a forensic psychiatrist...i was there answering questions for 4 hours...he wound up saying that my injury was not as bad as i and my doc claim and thst i was malingering so i could stay in a patient role. This journey has not only been painful but exhausting...every thing i did they tried to block. In the end though the offer came from there side just before the court date to argue the safety violation.