Gruesome Kitchen Injuries

     Page Sixty-Six.
     What's the worst injury you've ever sustained while cooking?
     It was 1979 and I was working at the Subconscious Sandwich Shop where we made really good submarine sandwiches. (One of our secrets was the fact that we sprinkled oregano on all our sandwiches.) So it was 8 or 9PM on a Saturday night and I was scheduled to work until 2AM. It was a little slow, so in preparation for the late evening rush, I started slicing onions. Our machine was a large, industrial slicer. It was the type with the round, dinner plate-sized blade and you put the onion (or what ever needed to be sliced)  against the metal, then put the protective handle down over the onion and then just zipped it back and forth along the track and the blade did all the work. Well, I was careless and didn't use the protective handle properly and as I was zipping the onion back and forth, I noticed that the sliced onions were turning red. I hadn't felt a single thing.
     My boss just happened to be in the shop at the time and I went out front to show her the many liters of blood that I was quickly loosing. She had a couple of friends with her: two doctors. One of them was concerned, the other wasn't. The one who wasn't concerned put what was left of my finger under water for a moment and the bleeding did appear to slow down. (Probably, I'd simply run out of blood and my body was busy trying to make more.) But the doctor who was concerned told me to call my boss occasionally at home to let her know the status of my life. They would all be at her home eating a glorious homemade French dinner together.
     Two or three phone calls and three gallons of blood later my boss and the concerned doctor were driving me to the local emergency room where I needed six stitches to sew my finger back on to my being. I'm sure the physician spent more time putting me together than Doctor Frankenstein did on his creation.
     The upside to this story is that I ended up with a doctor's note excusing me from gym class for a week. Seems that too much exercise could've caused me to start bleeding again. I did in fact continue to bleed even after the stitches were put in. I also entertained the resident (the young physician in training who was taking care of me) and that was fun. He'd probably been up for a couple of days and was absolutely slap happy. So I told him some funny stories of my life while he was putting me back together. At one point he was laughing so hard he had to stop sewing so he wouldn't screw up my stitches. (Ten-fifteen days later while the Boss-Doc was taking out my stitches he was extremely complementary to the resident. They were concerned that I'd need a skin graft. But the resident was so good at reattaching my own skin, a graft was unnecessary.)
     I still have the scar and that finger nail is also permanently disfigured (though mildly). Hopefully that will be the worst kitchen injury I'll ever sustain.