The stories of my scars.

Do, do, do, la, la, la, la, do, do. As the world has spun on its slant axis, many odd objects have found themselves in violent encounter with my largest organ, these are The Stories of My Scars.

Some lessons you only have to learn once, some you have to learn again and again.

I have had many personal rules, rules that I have imposed on myself for one reason or another.

I would make a game out of rules such as, I can only step one foot in each square on a sidewalk. I had a rule that I could only eat one bite of my birthday candy bar a day to make it last as long as possible.

One rule was that if I was using a circular saw to cut wood I had to wait to set it down until the blade had finished spinning. My dad told me of people who would set the saw on their thigh after a cut to give their arms a break. This is potentially very dangerous because the blade guard could stick in the up position, my dad explained.

At one point this particular rule became amended. I was using a portable hand planer. It will trim off the surface of a board and is meant to make fairly shallow cuts. It has three straight blades that are attached to a cylinder shape.

I was shaping a hand drum with it. This style of hand drum has straight tapering sides. I had been using the planer for some time and was worried that it might be over heating. I turned off the motor. I placed my left hand on the side to feel it. My left ring finger slipped just under the motor and into the spinning blades.

The emotional shock of trying to be responsible, considerate, safe, then finding my self at the mercy of a bloody mistake of only seconds and inches was almost the worst of it. This was a mistake. If I had only waited a few seconds until the blades stopped spinning, or had I not let my finger get so close... The worst of it wasn’t the pain, it didn’t hurt that badly. It was the embarrassment of making the mistake and the fear of being forced to own up to it with a trip to the emergency room and pay for the mistake with the price of the ER.

It didn’t shave my skin off in a wide area. The corner of the blades dug in deep. Most of my cuts up until this point had a flap of skin of some sort that I could close to help stop the bleeding. This one didn’t. I remember covering it with band aid, then with folded toilet paper, all wrapped in tape. It bleed through. Then I was worried that someone would see that it had bleed through and take me to the ER. So I change that bandage. This time it didn’t bleed through.

Now my rule is to freeze until the blade stops spinning. I don't always obey.