3/11/08
Despite my need to make a living and/or maintain my property, I'm not certain I was properly constructed for civilized life. Specifically, civilized life involving power tools.

This realization comes in response to having bloodily and extensively barked up my left hand with the aid of a pitifully small electric chainsaw with a brand new, nicely sharpened chain and a bad safety lock, an accident/stupid fuckup occurring whilst dissecting large chunks of leftover cedar tree in the lower forty percent of my own yard, said action preparatory to building a dear little treehouse to watch the sun set over the gulch from. Sweet dreams are made of these.

Wounded nearly as deeply as my hand was my overweening self-conceit. In the half hour immediately following the event, I spent approximately 10% of my attention on directing the dressing of the lacerations and the rest on sulphurously self-berating my lack of attentiveness to common ordinary rules of safety like never thrust your palm into a moving chainsaw. D'oh! Duh!

It might have been that particular pride parade that led me to eschew the perilous joys of the ER, even though my Most Esteemed And Sagacious Wifie turned a fishy eye on the Chickadee Chainsaw Massacree and pronounced it in need of stitches. That or my residual Y chromosome. While I'm not even the palest shadow of John Wayne, Jackie Chan or Will Smith, I do have a certain latent duh-DUH-duh-duh MAHN-ly tendency to brush off superficial injuries as unworthy of the dignity of a reply.

But there were other influences as well, e.g. I hate hate hatey-mcHATE ERs. Hate hate hate hate hate. Ten and twelve hour waits in grimy hard-chair foyers reeking of fear and fetal alcohol syndrome, enduring the lung-shredding coughs, the desolate stares, the querulous arguments, the piercing cries, the game-show watching TV proclivities of the Great Uninsured Populace. ERs aren't any particular circle of Hell, but they're definitely the antechambers. I love humanity, but I prefer to do it at a civilized distance.

And then there was the inevitable matter of a buck. I have the privilege of being perhaps the tenth to last adult to get enrolled in the Washington State Basic Health program before they slammed the door, a profligately progressive bit of 90's legislative sanity in a national sea of stupidity that aimed to provide low income and/or otherwise disposed individuals with a tattered minimum safety belt in the face of the avalanche of catastrophic medical expense that lurks like glistening banks of purest powder in the high reaches of the Cascades behind every encounter with modern civilization. You wanna get screwed up, ain't nothing like a machine to do it. Just ask my left hand.

Said program was buried under its very own avalanche of indigents (so many uninsured! who knew?) and had to drastically curtail its scope round about the time the last bubble burst, right before the tahrrists blew up the world and left us here in Bizarroland with no money, just guns. Stupid tahrrists. Consequently, what i get with my measly $30 a month enrollment (lucky to have it and subject to drastic revision should my income improve) is a $15 copay at my primary caregiver and a whoopin $100 at the ER. Unless, o'course, you're in such bad shape that you get admitted. Kind of a deterrent to just wandering in to get a superficial puny little chainsaw wound basted — on second thought, that scratch there doesn't look nearly as bad as I thought... Facist socialism. Gotta love it.

I'm fortunate in also having another much more consistent and reliable medical insurance, namely Quasi-Mutant Powers of Recuperation (TM). I don't get sick much, and when I do I get well quick. I get a big ugly cut, it closes up and heals like one of those Disney time-lapse flowers in reverse. All things considered, in the face of my own quick-and dirty diagnosis of The Cedar's Revenge (lessee, hurts — ow! — check — fingers wiggle okay, — ow! — check — feeling in tips, yepper, nothing stringy-looking hanging out, check check — hey, I think I'm okay!) (Okay, not okay okay, but still..), I was pretty sure that I could have foregone physicians entirely on this one and stuck to Band-Aids and hippy salve.

Time and reflection and antsy wifies being what they are, however, Monday morn (never get hurt on the weekend) found me on the horn to get candled by my primary care clinic, just in case. They took one look and, stricken by the use of the words "chainsaw," "hand" and "wound" in the same sentence, referred me to a hand guy. After a deal of whinging I got in to the hand guy on Tuesday who, after admitting that no, four days after the accident was too late to do much with stitches (I coulda told him that) (in fact, I did), opined that I'd been jeeest barely correct to have stayed out of the ER and advised me to keep it clean and exercise it gently for the next two weeks.

And home I rode, trailing clouds of vaporized testosterone behind. Oily though my use of it had been, the system, such as it was, appeared to actually work. At least I was able to get a modicum of the health care I really needed without having to go through the same shmoe-row as everyone else unfortunate enough not to be a trust-fund baby or indentured to a Fortune 500 company.

This kind of thing seems to happen to me every year or two, and I don't know quite how to avoid it without either a) Quasi-Mutant Powers of Concentration and Care (TM) (hey, where'd they go?) or b) Lenny the Gardener doing it for me and leaving me to my gin-and-juice (not that I'm particularly fond of gin-and-juice, but the concept still holds).

But those healing Powers had better get their mitrocondreal booties in gear — I got a gig on Thursday.