No matter how many times you hear it, or how painfully obvious the damage that can be caused, you cannot fully fathom the sheer idiocy of letting your digits linger around a running snowblower until you actually do it.

I am Exhibit A. Thankfully whole after my mishap, but with a pair of fingers that are not quite the same shape or color as built. I got very lucky to only mangle two digits; the corollary to an accident like mine is being regaled with numerous stories about some poor soul who got it worse. (My favorite, so far, ended this way: “…then he looked like a high school shop teacher.” This is never a positive or uplifting comparison.)

I just look like a dolt in a splint, with two bandaged fingers. I look funniest, however, behind a keyboard, where my poor left thumb is stuck doing the work of its fallen comrades. The ring finger, an innocent bystander, is stuck with its convalescing neighbors. The pinkie – a wholly underrated appendage – is doing yeoman’s work, like working the shift key and the odd, unintended interlude into CAPS LOCK, WHICH…sorry, which lends a real scream of pain into prose.

Not that I’m in pain, mind you. I’m numb; have been since Saturday afternoon, when my gloved hand became lodged in my ancient Ariens snowblower, after a piece of ice had clogged its chute. At its age (more than mine), the Ariens is venerable, but temperamental. Which is why I left common sense behind and decided against shutting it off to clear the chute; I knew once it was done, it was done for the day. As for why I didn’t disengage the clutch, I plead no contest.

I just wasn’t thinking. Since I stuck my precious fingers into a running snowblower, this conclusion should be apparent.

Nothing clears the mind better, though, than some Fetanyl and an quick ambulance ride to the hospital. Or a morphine drip and the blessed unconsciousness of emergency surgery (the OR crew, I understand, was called in specifically for me on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I still feel bad.) which awaited my arrival at Maine General. (After being told I could wind up in Lewiston, Portland or Boston.)

At the hospital, I was hailed as a delightful inevitability, like the first snowfall or New Year’s Baby. The first snowblower mangling.

They occur with frequency, I was told. Especially on warmer days when melting snow – surprise! – can clog the machine’s chute. Apparently, somebody, somewhere compiles statistics on this very topic. Even the hand surgeon said, “I expected to have one of these today.”

This made me feel better; instead of a dunce who stuck his hand into machinery, I was merely the victim of the situation. If not me, it would have been some other poor sod that lost touch (get it?) today. I was doomed by sheer, inescapable statistical probability.

And if you believe that, I have a 30-year-old snowblower to sell you. Cheap.

I’ll be a professional keyboard masher for about a month or so now, after nearly severing my way into another career. I’m going to throw my tightly honed ergonomics at my Sun Journal workstation into complete disarray, and maybe incur the wrath of human resources, but there’s no way to sit or type comfortably with only two operable digits on my left hand.

They look like two pigeons. On the right, a sharp-eyed forager. On the left, one that looks and acts like it’s flown into one too many plate glass windows.

Two pins, also, are holding together my fractured middle finger like crossed sabers. The bulbs on the outside of the pins gives the finger a vague resemblance to a bludgeoned Mickey Mouse. It’s definitely not something to show the kids.

All this free time (and pain medication) has given me time to reflect, though. What I have I learned from all this? It isn’t “don’t go sticking your hands into a snowblower” because I knew this already. That’s a lesson reinforced, not introduced.

Nope, the moral is much simpler. One about not always depending on machines to do the work, when the old-fashioned methods still work fine. As I watched the snow melt after the surgery (prior to the New Year’s storms, which my obliging neighbor plowed me from…thanks, Todd), this is what I thought. Instead of mechanical gizmos, the simple act of shoveling might have strained some muscles, but saved my digits.

I didn’t think when I acted. If I had thought right, I would have shoveled the driveway. Cogito ergo rutilo. I think, therefore I shovel.

After this experience, these are words to live by.