JOURNAL: MEDICAL: Cut my hand the worst I ever have with scissors in my life

So I decided to upgrade our 7.1 Home Theatre rear surround speakers…. From crappy black noname ones I got at a yardsale, to these better silver JVC ones with a bass port and everything, which I got off of Freecycle.

First, in order to hang them, I have to use a ruler and mark off where I want to add my hooks. Then I nail a thumbtack into the holes [my way of drilling pilot holes] and remove them. Then I screw in picture hanging hooks. I use 4 per speaker, for redundancy, after a speaker fell back when I use 2. A total of 8. Except I started with a different set, and ended up using 12. (Did a blind listening test with Carolyn — literally wearing a blindfold — which confirmed the results of my own listening test, that the silver speakers were better and I should have been using them. I didn’t realize they were wood-cased, I thought they were plastic and thus would not accept hooks.)

Anyway, screwing those 12 hooks in last night gave me a huge blister on my right hand! From screwing those tiny screws in! 1.0cm long, 0.5cm wide, and 0.4cm raised from my skin. I broke my tradition of popping all blisters and let it fester there in pussy healiness, since the body obviously does that for a reason.

The next step is to use picture hanging wire to create a wire hook to hang it to a ceiling hook that I have on my ceiling. Wire it through the hooks in a redundant fashion, then make a loop to hang.

Problem is, we ran out of picture hanging wire for the first time in 10 yrs after I did one speaker. I asked Carolyn to scrounge for more, and she brought up some REAL wire, i.e. stuff thick enough that you could use it in a soldernig iron. NOT woven picture hanging wire, but a single wire well over 1mm thick. A bit harder to bend.

Today, I went to cut that wire with scissors. No go. Way too thick. So I opted to use the “two handed dangerous scissor cut method”, which I have used many times in my life before, with larger and more dangerous scissors than the plastic-handled ones of Carolyn I was using.

I put my hand on both sides of the scissor and squeezed as hard as I could on both ends. BAM! I got that wire chopped!

And a great deal of my hand too. I screamed in pain. I looked at my hand, and saw an injury that was not so minor as to automatically exlude the possibility of going to the emergency room. It was actually a bit of horror movie psychology that I got to experience myself: Looking at a wound in horror, making noises that come from the animal kingdom (not humanity), feeling the adrenaline rush, and not knowing what to do for 2 or 3 seconds. (I don’t really panic, so losing presence of mind for 2 or 3 seconds is a significant psychological event for me.)

Of course I went for the camera right away [after 2 or 3 paper towels]:

Here’s the blood that landed on the floor between me sitting down and taking a picture 10 seconds later:

Much more on the floor before I managed to wipe it up. And it was stainy, leaving some red on the floor. I ended up spitting on it, as spit breaks down tough stains with its digestive properties, and carries its own disinfectant as well (why we lick wounds), but, most importantly, can be dispensed without leaving a trail of blood between you and actual cleaning products. Because waiting another 30 seconds would let the stain set more, plus I don’t want to get blood on any carpet. Later I used some water, I think I’ll have Carolyn use some Murphy’s Oil Soap on the floor later to give it a proper cleaning.

I went to the bathroom and realized a bandaid was not going to cut it. Hell, just while rinsing it with water, the blood would NOT stop. I needed some pressure.

Having no clue where we keep the gauze, since I hadn’t used it in quite awhile, I knew I needed something gauze-like to use. Not a towel or washcloth, they are too expensive to get blood all over. Not a shirt; same deal. What’s cheap? What’s cheap, cotton, and guaranteed to be clean? UNDERWEAR which just came out of the laundry. I’ll look for a pair with holes in it that I would probably be throwing away anyway.

So here I am with underwear wrapped around my hand. I call Carolyn up, and she talks me through finding the gauze. Speaker phone kicked ass, but I couldn’t hear her from the bathroom, so I tried our cordless phone we hadn’t used in years. It didn’t work. Argh. So I had to keep walking back and forth between the bathroom and the phone. But if I’d had a cellphone, I’d probably have gotten blood all over it, so this is okay. I find out the gauze is in the back of shelf 3 from the floor, so I get it out. I know where the tape is, because I had just reorganized 3 boxes of band-aids plus 2 rolls of medical tape plus scissors all into one tiny metal coffee tin; it was a 10 minute space-saving project we did last week in order to find a use for the coffee tin [rather than throwing it away]. It saved a ton of space.

So I wrap that baby up. By then, the toilet was pretty messy from the blood. (The sink was too.)

So I then scrub the toilet — I had to stick my hand in the toilet water and everything. Blood does NOT leave easy, I had to wet the whole rim of the toilet just to get my own blood off. Talk about adding insult to injury.

Now my day is filled with left-hand typos. What is the recommended interval of bandage changing, anyway?

The moral of the story: If wire clippers are 5 feet away, and you need to clip wires, for “Bob’s”sake get up and walk over there rather than using a pair of scissors that can’t cut it [pun intended].

Anyway, the other neat thing was – MY BLISTER ON MY RIGHT HAND INSTANTLY DISAPPEARED! I guess all the pus went over to my left hand. No, not really. But my body lost enough blood that it realized its fluids would be put to better use than being used for pussing up something that happened 16 hours ago. So now I have this weird “ex blister” on my right hand, bandages on my left hand, a cleaner toilet than this morning, and bloody underwear in the trash.

ALWAYS FUN UPGRADING SPEAKERS

Mood: recovering
Music: KMFDM – Mini Mini Mini