As suspected, my finger needs surgery. Tomorrow morning I will go to a hospital in Nacka where they will open up the finger again and try to stitch together the severed nerve bundles. The doctor I talked to yesterday thought that I would have to have a plaster with braces for about three weeks, which would suck. But I’ll know more about that after the surgery tomorrow.
On another note, the tetanus shot has made my left arm and shoulder all sore, even now four days later. Is that normal?
Yesterday my brother and his fiancee were over at our place for dinner with wine. Afterwards we were going out and thought that we should take the empty bottles with us since we were passing the recycling cabin anyway. While there my brother threw a bottle hard into the glass bin to make it crash. Unfortunately, part of the bottle ricocheted back up and came straight for me. Instinctive I put up my hand to protect my body from the whirring glass, and it hit my right ring finger.
And there were blood – lots of it. In fact, I even had an arch of blood across my face, going all the way into my right ear. The floor in the recycling cabin had blood splattered on an area about two meters wide.
We rushed back into the apartment, pressing the finger together, putting three compresses and a makeshift tourniquet made of tape while M called for a taxi.
After arriving at the emergency room at the hospital, I only had to wait for about 5 minutes before getting my hand looked at. After removing the bloody compresses and cleaning the wound with salt water they cut off the blood flow with a rubber tube and a peang. Prodding the finger with what looked like toothpicks, the conclusion was that I had lost feeling in about half my finger. After two anesthesia shots in the finger (that really hurt), I soon didn’t feel anything at all.
Despite the nerve damage they had to close the finger to stop the bleeding, so they started to sew. It was a really odd sensation to see them doing it and not feel any pain. After 10 stitches they released the peang to let the blood through the finger, but immediately had to put another two stitches due to leakage.
The people who closed up my finger were really nice, and we even had a few laughs together.
After getting my stitches it was time to x-ray the finger to look for skeletal damage (since the cut was so deep). For some reason this was considered a really high prio case, I got to go before people who had been waiting for several hours. Anyway, the x-ray turned out fine and the glass hadn’t damaged the bone.
A quick bandage and a tetanus shot later and I was on my way home again. Total time in the hospital was just above three hours, which was probably a new record for me.
Today the finger hurts quite a bit, and I will soon go the pharmacy to get the pain killers and antibiotics that I got prescriptions for.
Tomorrow I will have to go to another hospital, where a specialist in hand surgery will assess the damage and possibly open the finger up again to try to repair the damaged nerve(s).
Now, time for some (quite gory) pictures:
Tomorrow I will possibly have the worst trip of my life so far. Or the most boring, back-aching, cold and lonely. Or the best.
Anyway, I will attempt to drive my Gilera Runner (50cc) från Stockholm to Ulricehamn, a trip that totals about 440 kilometers. I will make a stop (and possibly spend the night) in Tibro, but have otherwise no plans besides hourly stops to stretch, eat, and so on.
Why? The practical reason is that I’m going to store the moped at my parents place during the winter, but the other reason is probably just for the heck of it. “Because it’s there”, as a mountain climber would say. When I was 15 I wanted to go on a moped vacation with my friends, but that never happened so perhaps I’m subconsciously compensating for it now. 
To quote the great Waylon Jennings: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.
To see the route I’ll likely take: Google Maps
Now: Time to pack.
Update:
A few miles from Katrineholm
The trip went great! I took the whole trip in one day, only staying for a pizza with my friend Dossen in Tibro instead of spending the night there.
Total travel time: 12½ hours, including a total of about 3½ hours of breaks for stretching, food and gas.
I’m very glad I took this trip. 
Today I once again went to Nille at Salvation Tattoo to get some ink done.
I have always been fascinated by mechanics, robotics and mechatronics, and for the last few years I have been thinking about how to incorporate that into a tattoo. Early sketches covered basically the whole back, incorporating the biohazard sign I already have on my back into the design. Though I like biomechanical tattoos to a certain degree I now think an entire backpiece would be too much for this type of design (ask me again in five years though). The particular idea with a cogwheel using a heart as the hub first crossed my mind about a year ago, and shortly after I did the first design.
I have doodled on this design and changed quite a bit during the last year. The main problem lately has been that I have done too much details and thin lines. Since human skin is a living material it is extremely hard to make small details by pushing down ink between the skin layers (which is basically what you do). Even if you do, chances are that the details will be lost. Ink is a liquid, and liquids float and spreads out, making everything a bit fuzzy at close range. This is considerably more noticable on older tattoos, where it can be hard (or even impossible) to make out text that was clearly readable when the tattoo was first made. I have still kept a certain degree of details, mostly for thin light lines and shadows. We’ll see how they look like a few weeks from now. Also, it is quite a bit darker now (especially the lines) than it will be when healed.
I put in some symbolism in it as well, but will not go into details (let’s just say I’ve been hurt enough times). Also, can you find the Douglas Adams reference? 
Tattooing your chest is a strange thing. It really hurts, but you don’t always feel the pain where you should. When Nille first started on the top right side, I felt it in the shoulder. Moving down, all of the sudden it felt like someone put a soldering iron to my nipple. This was not quite as bad as doing the elbow, but not far from it. Good thing I had my phone with me; Playing Solitaire and FreeCell partly took my mind from the pain – It helps to concentrate on something else.
So, what do you think?
Two times in two days I’ve seen people I don’t know crying in public.
Yesterday on the subway station on my way to work, a woman in her forties were crying. I wanted to do something, say something comforting but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know if she would have wanted me to.
Just now on the commuter train, on the way back home from a party, a younger woman around 20-25 were sitting on the row across me. Suddenly she got an SMS, and she started crying uncontrollably. As the tears started to flow, she turned away to hide her face, sobbing loudly. Again, I wanted to do something but didn’t know what. As this was the last train for the night and the train was almost at my station, I felt I didn’t have time to talk to her. As I passed her on the way to the door, I gently stroked her back in a comforting gesture. I don’t know if it had any meaning for her, but I simply couldn’t just pass her without doing something – especially since she and I were practically alone in the train compartment. Perhaps I should have stayed on the train, trying to talk to her and then grab a cab to get home – to have someone to talk to could be worth so much more than the money I would have spent. Perhaps she just wanted to be alone, whatever message her phone brought her needed solitude to digest.
What should you do in a situation like that? When you have no idea why the person in question is crying and don’t know if they want to talk to a complete stranger in a situation like that. It could be that a friendly hand means the world to them, but it might as well make things worse, putting them in an even more uneasy situation.
I hope both of them will be alright.
