Last week I cut the tip of my thumb off. Revenge of the Zuchini, let's call it.

My first reaction, after yelling an obscenity, was to staunch the blood flow. I then picked up the little pink thumb-cap from the cutting board (clean and un-thumblike, it looked more like a sliver of pickled ginger) and tossed it into the garbage. Threw the zuke slices into the wok (Revenge of the Jerry) and then went onto ichat and told my sis about the thumb incident.

You saved the skin flap, right?
No, I tossed it.
You are supposed to put it back on. Your own skin makes the best bandage.
Oh...

Hmm, be right back...

So I dug the skin chunk from out of the trash, rinsed it off in the sink, and then tried to pop it back onto the end of my thumb. The main difficulty was all of the blood. Even though the skin flap looked innocuous and clean, the thumb-end looked like a bad horror movie. With blood oozing everywhere I tried to quickly line up the flap and get pressure re-applied. We're still not sure if I have an upside down thumb print now.

Oddly enough it seemed to work. It took a day for the threat of heavy bleeding to subside and since then it has been mostly a matter of trying not to jam the thumb on something and injure or open it up again.

I've also learned how much I depend on my left thumb.

The best help so far has been butterfly bandages and super glue. Bandages to apply pressure when I re-injure it and super glue to tack the flap edges back down and keep them there for a while. What I really need is a hard plastic cap to put over the end of the thumb, mostly as protection against myself.