I have to admit I've been looking forward to the holiday for some time now. This year I decided to take four weeks, four entire weeks of relaxing and sleeping in.
I wasn't supposed to start my holiday yet though. I was going to work next week also. But, the gods of misfortune had other plans.
I received a load of plasterboards at work today, two palls standing on top of eachother. Had a guy with a forklift there to lift them off the truck for me, but the forklift had only short forks. You can lift those long palls with short ones if you're careful though. Problem is, one was on top of the other as I said, and because of that, when lifting the top one off the end that the fork didn't lift properly was sliding along the the pall underneath. Now, these palls are bound with these thin metal bands. The sliding pall hooked one of these on the one underneath, pulling it off and dragging the band along. It couldn't be there, and without thinking I grabbed it and yanked to pull it free.
It didn't come loose, but something else sure did! I felt I'd cut my right index finger, and when I looked at it I saw this loose skinflap on it, only hanging by a thread near the root of the finger. Looked like I'd only shaved some skin off, but then it started bleeding a whole lot. And when I lifted the flap to see how deep the cut was, I was lifting a lot more than skin. And underneath the flap, I saw a mess of torn muscle tissue. I'd cut along the finger, from the middle to the root, way into the muscle and almost back out again. So this huge chunk of finger was almost completely off.
Nothing for it but to head to the nearest emergency room. Where they stitched it back on and assured me that it should be just fine. But also told me I'm not going to do any more work before that muscle tissue knits. So after hearing when my holiday was starting, they put me on sick leave lasting till the end of next week. So I went back to the workplace, packed up my tools and came home just now.
And I'm looking at that bloody, bandaged, stitched-up mess that was my right index finger and am still not sure whether I should be thinking 'oh, bugger!' or 'woohoo, five weeks holiday!'.