Yes this is the saw that took my left pointer finger. I just told Greg and Liza the story when I was at their house and I discovered that I enjoyed telling the story so much that now I'm going to blog about it.
I was working as the service manager for a home improvement company in Sacramento, CA. My territory was quite large extending from Reno, NV, all the way down to San Jose, CA. On this particular day I was asked to install two nail on windows in Santa Rosa,CA. There are two types of window installations, popular in California. The nail on style installation basically means you're going to have a much longer work day. I had mixed feelings about the job I was scheduled to do. On the one hand I loved construction, tearing down and rebuilding structures was very satisfying. On the other I would be working alone, which was very lonely! Especially when working on larger projects. I worked out the process of installing the windows in my head on the way down to the job. The Job site was almost a two hour drive from Sacramento. Santa Rosa is on the far side of Napa Valley and Sonoma. It is a beautiful drive, however I was long burnt out on the frequency of trips I made to the area. I wanted to get there, do the job and get home. I arrived at the jobsite around 10AM. The house was a one story, with two large windows side by side in front. It had wood plywood siding with 2X6 wood trim around the windows. I was so relieved to see it! The installation style was difficult no matter what scenario, however this was way better than what I had expected. Most houses in California are Stucco. So first I had to get the 2X6 wood trim off. No problem. I got my razor knife and cut the paint and caulking all around the edges of the wood trim. Then I hammered the flat end of my prybar in behind the trim. It was extremelly tight so I worked at it for a while. I was trying not to damage the wood because I would be putting it back up after the windows were installed. Never mind it was a bigger problem than I had anticipated. I got the big fat max crow bar out of my truck! With it, and my big fat max hammer, I was able to slowly pry away the 2X6 exterior trim from the house. It turned out the wood was holding a lot of moisture and had swollen tight. Not only was it relentlessly gripping onto the house it was completely rotted in several areas. The homeowner who was very interested in my labor watched like an injured student as I struggled with his installation. I showed him the issues with the trim and explained to him where the wood should and should not be caulked. The siding behind the trim had areas of rot as well. I told him that it looked like he was safe from any rot to the stucture of the house and since I was cutting out the siding around the window, we would be able to remove all the existing rot and replace it with new wood and trim as part of the new window installation. Already the job was taking much longer than I had expected. I pulled my circular saw from the truck. Switched out the stucco/masonary blade, for a wood blade. I then measused a 3/4 inch blade depth, penciled a cut line around the windows and began to cut. I started on the far right, top side of the window. I had my little four step ladder, 'A' frame open over the bushes in front of the window. I lifted the saw up to the top right side. The saw was facing downward so instead of using my pointer finger to pull the trigger I was using my pinky. I rolled the saw up into the siding and cut smoothly all the way down the side of the window. As soon I was done with the cut I let go of the trigger, stepped down off the ladder turned to the homeowner who was standing right behind me and continued the explanation I was giving him about the process of intalling a nail on window. I don't remember what I was telling him, but apparently it involved hand gestures, because my left hand was up in the air. I was looking directly into the man's eyes when I dropped my left hand down next to the saw. 'Kkke kke' I heard the sound, but I didn't know what it was. I don't remember dropping the saw. I has holding my right hand over the top of my left finger squeezing as tight as I could. I had somehow touched the blade, which apparently hadn't finished winding down, with my left pointer finger. I knew I had touched it because I felt the sensation of touching something that was spinning very fast. It could have been a dull spinning wheel that I touched, because there was no pain to indicate injury. I possibly just barely, barely, touched the blade and maybe I didn't need stitches. I was hoping I wouldn't need stitches, because that would seriously mess up my whole day and I probably wouldn't get the job done.
"Ah man," I said to david. (the homeowner), "I think I might need stiches" As all this was going through my head I began to get very worried. Slowly I was realizing something was seriously wrong here. My right hand gripping over the top of my left finger was choked up further than it should be. The bone from my left finger was stabbing into the palm of my right hand. What did all this mean? I was too afraid to look! I stood there, like it was my first time going off a really high diving board and I was afraid to jump. I knew I had to, so quickly, without completely letting go, I opened up my right hand and looked inside. I closed my hand back up tight. It was worse than I thought. The end of my finger was completely gone. It was exactly what my right hand was feeling but my brain hadn't been listening. Now my eyes confirmed what my hand felt, but my brain was still in denial. I forced myself to look again!
"It's gone!" I said. "It's gone!" I said again.
I turned to the right, and looked at the ground. No nothing there. I turned to the left and looked at the ground. No nothing there either. What was I looking for? I didn't know. What was I doing? I didn't know! It was like the feeling of drowning in a nightmare. Suddenly I went into autopilot. It was like someone inside of me saw the struggling and stepped in.
"Okay, I need you to help!" I said to Dave. "Can you look up inside my saw and see if you can find the end of my finger" I'm going to get something for my hand. I ran to the truck. There were heavy duty, blue, Home Depot paper towels in the back of the truck. I stabbed my bleeding finger into my stomac as I grabbed the paper towels with my right hand and hurled off several sheets with a long tug.
I called back to David, "Is it there?"
"I see something," he called back!
As I was walking back toward the house, David was pulling the dead end of my cut off finger out of the saw. He had the tip of his fingers reluctantly holding my desecrated finger, his inside elbow of the opposite arm over his mouth and nose as if warding off the stench. He turned and dropped it into the plastic storage box for my circular saw.
"What are you doing?", I thought, as I quickly hurried to rescue my finger from the filthy box "That's my finger!".
David was wheezing and caughing as he quickly moved toward the house. "I'm going to get ice", he said. I had to push my finger, now wrapped in several blue paper towels, back into my stomach as I used my right hand to gently pick my detached finger up with a paper towel. There it was, the entire finger nail, unscathed, just lying there, still perfectly connected to my detached finger. It was surreal. I picked up the finger and wrapped it up in the paper towel. David returned with a bag of ice and I put the paper towel inside. David was still caughing and wheezing. I've joked about it several times since, because I was the one with the injury, but I was asking David, who 'appeared' to be more of the victim, if he was alright. He had the keys to his truck and we were on our way to the hospital within minutes of the accident. We parked right in front and went in. Traffic in the hospital was light. I walked straight up to the girl at the check in and put my bag of ice on the counter.
Soon I was on a hospital bed with an iv in my arm. I had an xray wheeled to my side and was immediately put on something similar to, but more powerful than morphine. An ambulance was ordered, and I was on the 101 highway to San Franscisco with sirens blazing, enjoying the view out the back window as we zoomed past traffic. My phone rang. It was my brother Mike. "Hey, whatcha doin," he said.
"Oh nothing, just riding in the back of an ambulance to the hospital. Hoping to get my finger put back on."
It turns out the Hospital in San Franscisco has several surgeons that specialize in reattaching body parts. They looked at my insignificant little loss and said, "You know it's your non-dominant hand, you can easily adapt to using your middle finger, You really don't need it!"
I said, "Well, you know I really would like to have it put back on"
"Okay." the surgeon said.







I realized several weeks after the accident that what happened was, I was subconsciously passing the saw from my right hand to my left hand. I was blindly reaching to grab the black nose on the saw with my left hand. Something I had done a thousand times before. The only problem was I had been sawing upside down and I was holding the handle with the trigger in my hand backwards. So when I swung the saw up to grab the nose with my left hand I was actually swinging the bottom of the saw face up into my left hand and my left pointer finger hit perfectly into the hole right in front of the blade.