How I came to call myself "LessDigits"

Online I go by LessDigits, it's a little play on words, making light
of the fact that I am actually missing most of my left ring finger.

I am 38 years old, and I grew up, and live in southwest lower Michigan.

Growing up poor, the way I did made me appreciate things more than my peers did.
My sister and I wore "hand-me-down" clothes given to us by cousins who had
outgrown them. Holidays and birthdays yielded new socks, underwear, and usually
a small toy or larger shared item, like the Atari game system we got one Christmas.

We always made do, and never went without, but not really having extra money in the budget for repairs we learned to do our own. I seemed to have a natural ability for being able to figure out how many things work, with our hands my father and I did what needed to be done around the property. I was myself still in school, and he wasn't educated past the 8th grade, but we did it all from the wiring, plumbing, carpentry to some car repair.

Upon leaving high school, after I had graduated I had gotten married
and found a job as a laborer on a residential building crew. After a couple years I found myself working at a small lumberyard. I really enjoyed it,and figured I would keep at it until I owned the place. In the next 15 years I worked my way up from a yard employee, to delivery driver, into the office as an inside sales person, and my duties ranged from the daily sales through inventory purchasing and account management. I wound up working at three different companies, the last one a large corperate owned company.

By then I was on my second marriage, I was now a father as well. Times were tight, just how they had always been, and like my father I was working as much as I could to make ends meet. This included doing side jobs, home repair and maintainance for people for extra cash. The job at the lumber company wasn't working out as I had hoped, I missed the feeling of the small town yards I had come from. This place was all about company policies, and didn't give me and opportunity to advance as I would have liked to.I made some bad choices, put myself in a bad spot, and had to quit that job, and found myself back in the construction field.

I worked for a local man, new to the industry, and like me seemed to work as much as posible. The trade in our area is almost always booming, this is the edge of Lake Michigan, a mostly resort type area, and it seems that those who live along it's shore always have the means to afford maintainence, repairs, etc. We worked together doing mostly remodeling work, some of the nastiest, most difficult jobs.

He and an investor had gone in together and purchased a total wreck of a place,a few blocks from the beach, one that needed everything from the foundation up, this place would be our ticket up a notch, instead of doing side work, I would spend evenings and weekends working on the place, looking ahead to a big payoff. We kept the pace for months, what seemed like endless hours, we did it all, new framing, new windows, doors, roof, siding drywall, wood and tiled floors. One of the last things we were doing was the siding.

On the west wall we had put in two very large bay windows,my boss had never dealt with the framing of one before, where as I had some experience. We had left the roof and soffit framing go until it was time to apply the siding, and that became my job.

It was the last Sunday in July, a real hot one with temperatures near 100 degrees and 90 percent humidity. Bay windows have roofs on them, but of obviously must smaller, with the lack of needing large framing material I set forth working with short 2x4's which I would rip and angle along the top edge to accept the roof sheeting from two directions, as I recall it was a 30 degree angle on the table saw.

My progress was moving along just fine. I had one window done and was working on the last rafter of the second one. As I was pushing the board through the machine, it began to bind on the blade, the blade quickly started to warp, which caused it to try to push the board back toward me. I was hot, and tired, it was the last hour of a long day, and not thinking, I reached over the blade to hold down the end of the board. In just a second, with no time to react, the board came back, with my hand still on the end of it.

With a 40 tooth blade, turning 3000 rpm. it tore into my fingers. It happened so fast, I hardly felt it. It took a few seconds to fully understand what had happened. I didn’t look, I didn’t have to, I could feel what was left of my ring finger dangling there. I shut the saw down, and started calling for my employer, who was on the other side of the building. I headed over to my truck, in which I kept a change of clothes. Still not looking, I reached inside and grabbed a t-shirt, made a fist around it, and wrapped the excess around the outside of my hand.

By this time my boss had made it over, he knew by the sound of my call, that something bad happened, and made sure to tell me that I shouldn’t try to drive anywhere. “No Shit!, Fucking call 911!” I snapped at him, he told someone else on the site to call 911, and tell them we would meet the ambulance at their garage a few miles away. As we got into the truck, he stopped and ran back to the saw and grabbed my finger, placed it in a bag of ice we had on the job, and we left.

I guess it was at that moment I realized I wasn’t going to get it back, of course I hoped I would, but I could some how just tell. I was surprisingly calm on the way, I was even working my cell phone, one handed, trying to contact my wife. I remember being able to get through to my step daughter, first asking if she may know where her mother was, “no, why?” she asked, and I responded, “ I cut my finger off” “WHAT?!” she shouted. We were just pulling in to the ambulance station, so I replied, “ I have to go, if you talk to her, tell her I’m on my way to the hospital in Michigan City” and hung up.

The EMT crew had the ambulance running, I remember how cool it was in there with the A/C running. They got me in, strapped me down and a tech told me he had to look at it, and I said that was fine. He winced as he opened the t-shirt, and I knew this wasn’t a good sign. They gave me a total of 6 cc’s of morphine, which didn’t make the pain go away, but made me not care, and as chatty as a Cathy Doll.

At the hospital, everyone was nice, they were also honest, they had called a plastic surgeon in, but felt he didn’t have enough to work with. Sure enough, he came, one look and he told me straight, there was no posible reattachment .
I had taken off the top of center knuckle on my pinky, cut most of the tip off my middle finger, and the blade had gone down the length of my ring finger. The saw’s blade must have grabbed my wedding ring, (my grandfather’s 18k white gold ring, it was mangled, but I still have it) which was still on my hand. Word had spread through the family,and my wife was by my side for what was next.

The surgeon prepared my finger for closure, first by cutting back the jagged edges of bone with a pair of side cutters, just below my first knuckle. He removed the extra skin, cleaned me up with peroxide, and stitched it closed. The remnants of my finger lay in that bag of melted ice, on the counter of exam room three, lifeless and gone forever. Within three hours of the accident I was walking out of the emergency room, less one digit.