Week Three: Drill Bit
Entry posted by Nukaya
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The main things I learned this week is that it is extremely satisfying when the LEDs you soldered together successfully light up, and that drill bits should not go into your thumb.
That was my adventure this week! Wednesday afternoon, I was drilling out LEGO pieces to put wiring through for a street lamp, and the drill bit somehow slipped off the LEGO piece and went directly into my left thumb. A super sharp drill bit is definitely not something that you want going through your thumb, and I kind of just looked over at one of my coworkers and was like "help?", which didn't click for him until he looked at my hand and was like "ohgod".
This is when my other coworkers ran over and were also like "ohmygod how what someone call 911 DON'T REMOVE IT FROM YOUR HAND" to which I was like "I'm not going to remove it because there is a drill bit in my thumb and I'm still holding the drill why is this happening also I can't see anything because I'm wearing safety goggles where are my glasses but I can't get them because I can't put the drill down help?????" Yet another coworker detached the drill bit from the drill, which was about when the full realization of what had just happened hit me. Luckily, I have coworkers who are not only amazing but also super skilled at First Aid, and one of them wrapped my thumb so the drill bit wouldn't be able to move.
The rest of my day went pretty much like this:
- Sobbing and apologizing way too many times to my boss Ryan, to which he responded "It's ok, we want to make sure that you are going to be ok, we'll laugh about this later".
- Attempting to remember Pat's phone number so Ryan could let him know what had happened as I was being put in an ambulance. Turns out this is really hard to do when you're in shock, but I DID IT.
- Riding in an ambulance!
- Getting an IV put into my arm.
- Being given morphine, which was weirddd.
- Having a serious shock-induced inner debate on whether I could convince the paramedic to take a selfie with me (the answer was no because I was just way too out of it at that point).
- Making up hand and drill puns with the paramedics. This was oddly calming and included the highlight of "So, were you listening to Tool when you put that drill bit through your thumb?"
- Discovering that my emergency room roommate was a six year old girl who had fallen off the monkey bars at school and hit her face on a bar. She knocked out a baby tooth and had to get nine stitches and was an absolute champ. I would have high fived her but I still had a drill bit in my hand.
- Having five extremely painful shots of some mysterious liquid injected into my thumb to make it go numb.
- The doctor pulling the drill bit out of my thumb and going "oh wow, this thing is sharp!"
- A nurse cheerily bringing back a sanitized and ZipLocked bagged drill bit, "so you won't have to buy your work a new one".
- Discovering that, oh wow, morphine makes me extremely nauseous, and that it gets even worse when the nurse decides to go super fast with the wheelchair while going to get x-rays.
- Getting to call my boss and my coworkers to see who can come get me from the hospital and take me home.
- Also discovering that I somehow didn't hit the bone or any tendons in my thumb with the drill bit.
- Telling Ryan "yeah I guess I'll come into work tomorrow because I'll be really bored at home if I don't". PRIORITIES.
While this was not the way I expected my third week at LEGOLAND to go, now I have a ton of bandaids, one tiny puncture hole connected to a large zigzaggy puncture hole, approximately four weeks of healing (and four weeks of building with only my right hand), and what I hope to be one crazy looking scar.
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