(written on the 9th)
When I woke up this morning, my fingers, the two that were smashed in the car door were crazy swollen. I couldn’t really tell the color because I still had leftover paint on my fingers that didn’t wash off very well with the brake cleaner.
It felt like my fingers weren’t getting any circulation, which was a little concerning, so I called on my mom’s nursing expertise and asked her about it.
She said she needed to know the color of the fingers, so I headed up to Liz’s to get some warm water and soap, and I used One of my work toothbrushes to clean my fingers until the paint was gone and the actual color of my fingers could be seen.
Gratefully, the color was good, so there didn’t appear to be any larger issue, though they certainly were swollen quite a bit, and the black part of my fingernail had grown quite a bit bigger.
Chatted with Liz for a good little while about what’s going on with her and the dogs. She finally got her first sale, so that’s exciting. 😊
Chatted a little bit with what’s going on with me and where I might be living. She and Mike have been super awesome and crazy generous through everything that’s been going on. 🥰
Today was supposed to be, and was even a perfect day for finishing painting ET, but I just didn’t have it in me today. It was cloudy and would have been great, but for some reason… Nothing doing inside this little brain for painting today.
So instead, I worked on taking loaf apart, having decided 100% to just remove parts that might be helpful, and take the rest to the scrap yard.
The disassembly process was a little bit of a ready fire aim approach. 🙃 I just assumed since those Vans changed so little over time and both had the same engine and same front suspension that pretty much everything else was going to be the same as well.
Nope.
After spending a whole bunch of time taking stuff off, I realized that the alternator was actually different, and then the starter was different… So I started looking things up, and a heck of a lot was different.
Crazy one being a ’98 and the other being an ’01. In another another type of vehicle, I would have been more concerned with the possibility of different parts, but not with old Vans like that that stayed looking the same for a good long time.
Oh well. So I took off a lot of things that I can’t use, and I spent a lot of time taking things off that weren’t going to work.
Is what it is.
I ate my words from yesterday about the person who didn’t show up after saying they were going to, the person who was interested in the Volkswagen Beetle.
They actually did show up today, though they were running on Latino standard time. 🙃
They showed up 4 hours after they told me they were leaving Tulsa, which is only a 2-hour drive. And when I asked after like an hour and a half or 2 hours into the 4 hours what their ETA was, they just replied that they were on their way.
But 4 hours later, they arrived with a tow dolly, took it for a test drive, and then gave me $300 less than the bottom price I said I was going to take, but I just wanted it gone, and though I got quite a bit less than I was hoping for, at least it’s gone.
Having a vehicle gone is a big step forward, visually and psychologically. It’s one less thing crowding The view and making this place look like a junkyard, and it’s one of three vehicles that I’m immediately getting rid of.
It was my goal to get rid of loaf today, but it looks like that’s going to be tomorrow.
I hope.
After I sold the Beetle, I kept working on taking loaf apart. The gas tank was completely full, so that’s $85 to $100 worth of gas just right there. So I dropped the tank to drain out the gas. I didn’t spend much time dropping the tank because I actually just used my grinder and cut off parts of the support straps and then just let the gas tank pretty much fall down on some blocks of wood that I added to make the distance it fell be a little bit less. It only took me probably 10 or 15 minutes to get the gas tank down.
I tipped it on its side, and let it start draining into a 5 gallon gas can, and I kept taking stuff apart.
Most of what I took apart probably won’t ever be used. I took lots of door handles off because it stinks to have door handles break on you, and with a van that old, I didn’t know how hard it was going to be to find door handles. But as I was taking the door handles off, I realized they were all super beefy, so the odds of them breaking are probably pretty small anyway. 🤪
Oh well. I’ve got door handles if I need them. 🙃 I kept taking stuff apart until into the evening. My mom actually showed up at some point in the evening, I think around 6:45, and she helped me clean stuff up.
She asked me when I ate last, and I remembered that I hadn’t eaten yet, nor had I taken any pain pills for my fingers which were starting to hurt a fairly decent bit.
Working on taking stuff apart all day meant banging my fingers periodically, and each time I banged my middle finger, it sent me through the roof, breathing hard trying to cope with the pain.
My mom suggested a finger splint, and I remembered that I had one in my medical supplies, so I dug it out, and gratefully it was right there on top of a huge bin full to the brim with all sorts of random medical things.
Having that on my finger reduced the instances of significant, shocking pain quite a bit.
It’s so amazing how much what seems like a fairly minor injury can hurt. Good freaking gravy.
After that, I stopped off at Jenna and Zach’s to help Zach with his lawn mower that had broken down.
From there, we headed into town, and my finger started just throbbing. The pain was bad enough That it had me doing that hard focused breathing.
It would come in waves. Pretty much the whole drive over kicked my trash, and then I was good for most of the time that we spent inside Wendy’s, though it did come in one wave while in Wendy’s, and then it was awful for the drive home.
Probably like a seven or eight on the scale of pain with 10 being burning alive.
As my mom mentioned, there are so many nerve endings in the fingers that it’s no Wonder having bamboo splinters under people’s fingernails was a very effective form of torture.
Holy freaking crap. So much pain for damage that’s not really all that important.
Anyway, even though last time I drilled out my nail to relieve the pressure, And that brought immediate relief followed by a significant increase in pain, I thought maybe it could be pressure building up again. The black spot on my nail had grown significantly, with little tentacles reaching all the way to the edge of my nail, which I figured must be little channels of blood trying to get out.
So I crawled back out of Rover, grabbed my drill bit, sterilized the end, and started drilling back through my fingernail again.
With the whole having been drilled once before, it wasn’t hard to drill through again. I think the drill bit that I grabbed was a little bit bigger this time.
Even though it had been probably 36 hours, or so, since I smashed my fingers, once I drilled back through the nail and through the scab, blood started flowing again.
It was really interesting: I had used my flashlight, like you do when your kids, Right up next to my fingers, and your finger turns out orangey red, like it’s translucent, but you can’t see the bones or anything. But everything’s bright red translucent.
Well, that’s how every finger was on my hand but those two. My index finger was decently bright, but there was a little shadowy spot where it was smashed, and my middle finger… Gosh, my middle finger had a big old black spot about the size of a dime where it was smashed. No light getting through at all.
After I drilled through the nail and started letting the blood out, those little tentacles that I hypothesized were blood trying to find an Escape route started retreating, indicating that it was indeed blood.
A lot more blood came out than One might expect. My mom was surprised by how much it was when I showed her pictures. It just seemed like it just kept coming and coming.
But there was an immediate reduction in pain as soon as The drill that broke through and blood started flowing out. Pain basically dropped to a level two or level 3 instantly.
🥳
And the black spot that was about the size of a dime that was blocking light from getting through with the flashlight to my fingers, shrank and continued to shrink until what was left was a little Shadow instead of the big black spot.
I probably spent maybe 30 minutes or more doing my exploratory drilling, squeezing the blood out of the different areas hoping to prevent it from happening again. I also started drilling a pilot hole for another relief point just in case it was going to be needed later.
And that was the day. I messed around with stuff online after that and headed to bed, grateful to not be in pain anymore, at least not finger pain.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 