Lessons Learned: Them's the Breaks

So we were working on the house on July 2nd, and because we had rented a dumpter we were doing demolition. We were working on one of the bedrooms on the second floor known as the burlap room because previously the walls and ceiling were covered in burlap. Scott was knocking down plaster with a shingle remover and I was shoveling it into 5 gallon buckets. (Scott says I should mention that I suggested that we should stop for the evening because it was getting late but he said we should keep working because we only had the dumpster for a limited time. And he wasn't tired.) To make things easier we had lined buckets up along the wall where he was working to catch the falling plaster so we would not have to shovel so much. Scott started at the top of the wall, standing near the top of the ladder and worked his way down. About half way down the wall he ran into trouble and learned a few things:
"If you are planning to take plaster off lathe with a shingle remover be aware that the installers might have randomly decided to put a vertical piece of lathe on the side of a stud for no reason, and if they did your tool will likely catch on it. If you are standing on a ladder which is positioned on rubble when that happens the ladder will tend to slide in the opposite direction. If a brick hearth juts out of the floor and catches the leg of a sliding ladder, the ladder will tip over. If you fall off a ladder don’t land arm first, and if you insist on doing that (due to physics) don't stick your thumb in a 5-gal bucket when your hand goes outside of the bucket. It turns out that is bad for you. Quite educational really."

After he fell I asked if he was okay since I didn't see what had happened. Very calmly he immediatly said, "Emergency room." I ran downstairs as fast as I could without evening seeing the injury and grabbed my purse and tote, the cell phones, and Scott's wallet. By then he was walking out the front door and I saw his grotesque malformation. (See x-ray above.)

I drove to the only emergency room I know how to find here, with Scott giving helpful driving advice and colorful commentary along the way. When we got there the people looked at us somewhat askance since we were covered from head to toe in dust and soot. (Which is in the walls from Pittsburgh's industrial days and coal heating.) Luckily Scott's hands were clean because we had been wearing nitrile gloves. As we were being taken back Scott started to get dizzy and mentioned it to the nurse. She kindly informed him that he was hyperventilating. He said, "Oh, thank you" and stopped. Then she asked another nurse to get him some pain meds that the doctor ordered. Nurse 2 replied,"I'll get them in a minute. I'm busy." I was more than a bit upset by this point and countered in my best teacher voice, "Could you please hurry, ma'am. He is in a lot of pain." Scott very sweetly suggested I be calm and that she was probably doing her best. Eventually she saw his hand and was taken aback by the unnatural position of the thumb. After that she was much more helpful.

After a while x-rays were taken and the doctors came by. They put his thumb back in place and showed us one fracture on the x-rays. (A second worse fracture was not immediately evident.) They put on a splint and Scott was discharged and told to follow up with an orthopedic surgeon.

One week, two doctors visits, one MRI, two pins, and one surgery later he is once again writhing in pain. Some things never change, hopefully this is not one of them.