Warning: some of the photos here are a tiny bit graphic, so don’t go on if you’re squeamish!

It started with a text message. One I didn’t even take seriously. At first.

I was driving home from Montreal where I had just spent a lovely girls’ weekend with two friends when I got a text. Now I know that texting and driving shouldn’t mix (topic for another blog, that), so we’ll just skip right past that detail to the contents of the message.

It was from my husband and all it said was “Cut my hand on the bandsaw. At the hospital.”. I thought he was kidding – he never texts if he can at all avoid it and certainly not that many characters. But just in case he wasn’t, I gave him a quick call.

Sure enough, he’d had a little “incident” with the band saw and was waiting in the ER at Cambridge Memorial Hospital. That in itself was a bit frightening to me, as he only goes to the hospital when it’s absolutely necessary, although I felt a bit a better when he assured me that he was still in possession of all of his digits and yes, they were attached to his hand.

When I got home, I made my way over to the hospital, where I found my husband in the packed emergency room, hand wrapped in reams of white gauze. It was now about 7 pm. He’d been there since shortly before 6 pm, got through triage and was told to wait. I settled in to wait with him.

At 9 pm I went to get the last coffee before the Tim Horton’s in the hospital closed. By 10:30, he’d had enough and was threatening to just go home if he couldn’t get through to see someone by 11 pm. At 10:55, his name was finally called – luckily.

We sat in the back until about 12:30, when the doctor finally arrived, assessed the damage and then proceeded to fix it. The saw blade had gone through the tendons in the index finger knuckle on his left hand, right to the bone, so it was a matter of sewing the tendons back together and then stitching up the hand (see here).

Out of idle curiosity, I asked the doctor what would have happened if my husband had decided not to come to the ER with his wound. He said that due to the tendon injury, his index finger would eventually have curled inwards and he would have lost the use of it. Yipe – good thing he decided not to leave!!!

We finally got home at 2:30 am, tired and hungry but very cognizant of the close call he’d had and how incredibly lucky he had been.