jack, jack, jack

Last night, the perfectly delightful Audrey came to gramma's to play on my park (swingset), and play with my pincesses and their house, and have a bath and put on jammies, and go to the eat house (McDonald's). A whole lotta fun for Audrey and me.

Jack and Jr were downstairs working on the basement remodel, nailing up stuff and drilling holes through floor joists for pipes and wires to fit through (so they would all be up inside of the suspended ceiling, instead of hanging down crisscrossing all over the place).

Audrey and I were preparing to head to the eat house and then to her house because she had had enough of the 'scary noises' (pounding and drilling) coming from the basement. Perhaps I should have known right then. I mean, if a two-year-old recognizes a scary noise, shouldn't I?

But I didn't recognize the noises for what they were. Even when they stopped. Quite suddenly. It wasn't until Audrey and I entered the kitchen to pick up her bag and blanket and saw Jack that I realized those scary noises had been telling us something.

Turns out that even though Jack is a big, strong, manly man, a construction guy, a man of all trades, capable of and regularly performing repairs and redos of all kinds, even he is no match for a corded drill with a hole saw attachment. Well, he might be a match for that drill and hole saw, but his thumb wasn't.

Just 30 seconds after he warned Jr of the dangers associated with power drills that are plugged in (as opposed to the battery operated type, which means seriously increased power to the drill), his hand lost control of the power drill for just a split second (really, not even a second), and that drill got all high and mighty and decided to be king of the basement remodel world and Jack's right thumb. Um, I think it's called 'torque'? The drill bit (in this case a hole saw that makes big holes in wood) dug its teeth into said wood, but not enough to chew through said wood, only enough to cause the rest of the drill to try to spin, taking Jack's thumb with it in said spinning motion, putting Jack into a really, really bad place. Because by then, it wasn't just his thumb that was overtaken by that dirty rotten drill and its hole saw bit, it was pretty much all of Jack.

That's how it is. Everything's going great one split second and then--BAM--things go very bad and your thumb may be facing the correct direction after the BAM, but for some period of time there, it was not facing in the usual anatomically correct position and suddenly your hand hurts like heck. (I said heck there because Jack doesn't like it when I cuss in writing. But he did say he may have cussed out loud when the drill tried to spin his thumb off.)

When I entered the kitchen and saw his face, I knew something was very wrong. More wrong than two days before when I saw the look on his face after the piece of sheetrock that covers the opening into the attic broke into two pieces and fell, folded edge down, directly onto his right wrist that was holding onto the ladder he was standing on. He told me then he thought he might have broken his arm, but after holding an ice pack on it for a while, he decided it would be okay. And maybe it was okay, but it does have a nasty mark on it that looks like a burn that removed the hair on that spot of skin and will probably become a bruise before it's all healed up.

Last night, when I saw his face, I knew something was more wrong than the arm injury. I asked, he answered, we both looked, I took Audrey home, and then we headed to the emergency room. As we parked the car at the hospital, Jack asked me if I thought the insurance company would give us a hard time for going to the ER for a broken thumb. I think I told him they should just try it and see what happened.

Believe it or not, we were at the ER for less than two hours. It may have even been around an hour. However long it was, I think it was a world record for shortest ER visit ever. We walked in, they admitted Jack, we hardly waited in the waiting room, they called him back, the doctor came in while Jack was in the restroom, the doc asked if it hurt to touch his pinkie with his thumb (those ER docs are soooo sneaky, I think he knew it would hurt and it did, caused all kinds of new wincing on Jack's face), x-ray guy took him to radiology for x-rays, chatted about his own construction work injuries, nurse came in and gave Jack a tetnus shot and some percoset for the pain (pausing for just a second when she saw the dosage, but Jack's a big guy who was in big pain), came back and splinted his wrist and hand, doc said there didn't appear to be any breaks but likely he had torn the ligament that stabilizes his thumb, gave us a prescription for more of the pain medication and the phone number of an excellent hand specialist (who happens to be the son of the guy who repaired Jack's knees, ankles, and shoulders after various sports-related injuries over the years), and sent us out the door. In less than two hours.

So there you go, you can get excellent hospital care even if you are at the ER and not the transplant floor.

And now Jack's got a big ole fat splinted bandage on his right hand to immobilize it, and according to the internet, he's headed to surgery to repair it. And he has to put up with not only the injury to his thumb but also his pride when all the maintenance guys he works with see his big splinted hand and harrass him about it. And I'm thinking that the basement remodel has been the biggest pain in the butt remodel we've ever attempted. It's hard to tell yourself that it will all be worth it when the power tools take over.