The Turn of the Screw
Great moments in building history: You have to bring your own equpiment if you want something done here
After 25 years in the construction industry, I had an accident: a run-in with a tablesaw that the saw won, taking the tip of my left ring finger almost all the way off. I was running a cheek cut for a rabbet, and the sawblade was about 3⁄8 in. up from the table but buried in the board I was cutting. In a nanosecond, the board teetered, and I lost track of the blade’s location. Suddenly, too quickly for my mind to comprehend, I was staring at a floppy finger and gushing blood, and I felt a sense of total stupidity.
Thank goodness for modern orthopedic surgery. The doctor reattached my finger, put a graft where the bone had been cut away and ran in a couple of threaded pins to hold everything in place. The pins stuck out of the tip of my finger about 1⁄2 in.
After six weeks of healing, I was ready to get rid of those obnoxious pins. They got caught on everything, and I poked myself in places where I didn’t want to be poked, largely my own doing because I hated wearing the finger cover the doctor had given me.
At the doctor’s office, everyone was in good spirits, looking forward to going home because it was the end of the workday. Only a couple of patients were with me in the waiting room.
The doctor called me in for a couple of X-rays, then called me in to an examination room, where I waited for the X-rays to develop. The X-rays showed that the finger hadn’t healed completely. Still, the doctor wanted to remove the pins because I refused to wear the finger cover; the subsequent banging around of the pins was delaying the finger’s healing.
When the doctor asked his assistant to retrieve the pin puller, the assistant replied, “Pin puller? We have the puller for the smooth pins but not the threaded ones.” It turned out that they usually request a pin puller from the surgical center in advance but failed to do so for my visit. The receptionist offered to pick one up, but the drive would have taken about 20 minutes. We all just wanted to go home.
Joking, I said, “I have a screw gun in the truck.” The doctor turned to me and asked, “Does it have a fresh battery?” “Well, yeah, always. Do you want me to get it?” So we decided to go for it, and I got the screw gun from my truck.
As I walked back through the doctor’s waiting room, I glanced at the two patients there and said, “You have to bring your own equipment if you want something done here,” squeezing the gun’s trigger a few times.
I sat back on the table and held my hand still as the doctor tightened the chuck on the first screw. “Make sure it’s in reverse,” I said. The doctor was laughing so hard he could barely get a grip on the pin. He slowly started to back out the first pin, which unthreaded fine.
As he tried to chuck up the second pin, I let him know that rental on the surgical tool I was providing was only $4,000 a day; he laughed so hard that the pin was crooked when he chucked it up. Eventually, we both were laughing so hard that I was shaking one way as he shook the other. When the second pin finally unthreaded, the exam room was full, with the receptionist, the assistant and another doctor all there taking in the scene.
—Keith Dillon, Paso Robles, CA
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