I was 17, doing a night shift job during summer vacation. Perfectly legal, limited to only certain amount of hours per week/month/year.

On this particular hot summer day, before one of my shifts, I did not sleep much, three hours maybe, because I’ve decided to play Quake all day at home. I woke up late and got to work at like 22:00 instead of 20:30. It was a polyfoam mat processing factory and for being late, I thought I’d be sent to the recycling furnace: a position where you and another kid have to line up a load of discarded polyfoam scraps that a machine then pulls in on a conveyor belt, flattens and bakes it into insulation mats for construction. Super boring, with spurts of 10 minutes of loading and then half an hour of dozing off on a foldable plastic chair. A load alarm would wake us up at the end of the baking cycle.

But my boss had other plans for me. He told me to grab an exacto knife and head out to the back of the building with him. We walked along the designated pathway demarcated by fluorescent white stripes on both sides past all the machines and stations on the factory floor. Then out the loading bay door past one particular machine that seemed to end in a sort of funnel outdoors. My boss pointed at a tall staple of plastic sack: “These are plastic pellet sacks. You have to pick them up one by one, place the sack over the funnel. Then you open up the sack with your knife and empty it’s contents into the funnel. The machine will do the rest. Keep filling the funnel with new sacks if it empties.”

Easy enough I thought. Boss left again on his long walk back towards the offices on the other end of the factory hall. I’ve felt particularly sleepy and tired on this pleasantly warm summer night , but I’ve picked up a bag with my left arm and held it pressed to my body. However when I’ve tried cutting it with my right hand, I just couldn’t get the ~8kg slippery plastic sack high enough with that arm and was scared I’d spill the pellets on the ground. So in my infinite wisdom I’ve swapped the bag under my right arm and the knife into my left hand. Much better. I’ve made a wide cut on the bag with the exacto, funneling in the pellets into the machine as it was slowly gobbling it all up to extrude it into whatever material would later become the polyfoam base.

But then I’ve felt it. A sharp pain from my right hand. My middle finger in particular. I’ve carefully slid the half-consumed sack on the ground and started to investigate. The tip of my finger was hanging on a sliver of skin, and wherever I was waving it, I was doing picasso-like splatter but in blood. Nothing too extreme, but definitely bleeding a lot. Reminded me of Inspector Gadget’s gadget finger, open up the tip to reveal a screw driver or some telescopic listening device. I became woozy. An earlier childhood memory came back, where I have busted my palm open on a sharp rock and my knees felt like jelly. This was a similar feeling. I knew I’d need help soon. So I went inside the factory hall through the loading bay and started walking back towards the offices, while doing my best to squeeze my finger with my left hand. What felt like a minute of walking past various machinery, I got to a group of people, which included my boss handing out instructions to other latecomers in front of the supervisor’s office. He looked up at me and before he could ask why I’m not at my assigned station, I held my bloody hand up and tried to say “I don’t feel well.”

Next thing I know is that I had a killer headache in the back of my head. The floor is pleasantly cold but my head is resting on the lap and palms of a slightly chubby and angelic sounding girl. They are telling me I’ve passed out and hit my head hard while splattering blood around with my finger. They put a rag-tourniquet around my arm and wrapped my finger in another rag. Someone was stating they are getting their car. The angel helps me up and walks me outside in the fresh air during this warm summer night. The asphalt in the parking lot is still radiating a lot of heat. They drive me to the ER in a small hatch back, all while having a jolly chit chat and trying to keep me from passing out again. I tell them that I get motion sickness if I’m not sitting in the front, but the angel insists I have to sit with her in the back. Her voice is very soothing. I almost fall asleep.

We get to the ER and they get me into a wheelchair and push me in. My angel passes me off to the nurses but says she and the driver will stay around while they wheel me into a room. The nurses buzz around me, three of them performing minor tasks in tandem. They don’t look too concerned. They rather have the aura of quiet but slightly bored dutiful professionals about them. They position my right arm on a sort of stand that they rolled up next to my chair and then take off the makeshift tourniquet and rag and start inspecting my finger. I look up at it briefly.

I come to again with some pain in my neck, this time with my head propped up by one of the nurses. One of them laughs while exclaiming that it looks like I can’t handle the sight of my own injuries. She might be absolutely right! They quickly proceedes to clean up the wound and glue my fingertip back.