HOT FLASHBACK!! Sewing machine redux

Before we left Boston, Barbara B of the Knittin' Kittens encouraged me to pack my sewing machine so I could be crafty here in London. We did just that.
I unpacked it today, and was reminded of the following incident that occurred only 18 months ago. Why the machine deserved to be transported over here after the way it behaved in Belmont is open for discussion.

I republish this classic blog entry for the edification of my newest readers.
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Monday, April 02, 2007

WOMAN MAULED IN VICIOUS SEWING MACHINE ATTACK !!

At approximately 8 pm last night Eastern standard time, a Massachusetts woman was injured in what appears to be a vicious, unprovoked attack by her sewing machine. The woman, whose name was not immediately available, was placidly sewing on some costumes for a children's school musical production when her sewing apparatus attacked with no warning.

With scorpion-like swiftness, the machine reached out and pierced the innocent woman's left index finger with it's needle-sharp needle. The sound of snapping metal reverberated throughout the room and a searing pain overtook her. She immediately stood up and examined the finger, from which part of the needle was seen protruding, having gone in through the top of the fingernail and partially out the fingertip. The only other evidence of this random impalement was a single drop of blood oozing from the fingernail. She loudly called upstairs, alerting her family to the fact that she was in need of immediate medical attention. Her devoted husband drove her to the nearest hospital, using the exact route they had rehearsed only thirteen years earlier in readiness for the birth of their second child at that very hospital. In the waiting room, she ran into xxxxxxxx, who owns the local ice cream emporium and who remembers her from 19 years ago when, during the hottest summer on record, she used to wheel her first-born in his stroller up to the corner for ice cream and air-conditioning. Xxxxxxx was in the emergency room with his father, who had been in the industrial sewing machine business, and who insisted on finding out what brand and type of machine had gone so horribly wrong. Chatting with them was a good antidote to the searing pain now throbbing through the woman's hand. In between shouting her answers at the elderly partially-deaf man, they watched "Dancing with the Stars" and assessed their chances of being seen any time in the near future.

The woman soon received superior care at the hospital and was home in under three hours from the time of the accident. She received before-and-after x-rays, a local anesthetic injection into the affected finger, extraction of most of the needle, potent pain management medications, and a band-aid. She also had to endure the radiologist's story of how he had nailed two of his fingers together with a nail gun. She was prescribed potent painkillers, which she advised the medical professional would keep her up all night cleaning the house. No, no, they said. This will make you sleepy AND kill the pain, unlike a sedative. Whilst waiting for the taxi that would take her home, she decided she really did need to lessen the pain, as the local anesthetic began to wear off. Arriving home at 10:45 pm, she began to putter around the house, doing dishes, tidying up, and writing this memoir of the occasion while under the influence of the "narcotics", which had absolutely NO sleep-inducing effect.

Due to the fact that a fragment of metal remains in her fingertip, even though she is actually able to use it without pain to type this report, she will undergo medical follow-up by the hand specialist in a day or two, with an in-patient surgical procedure to remove the remaining fragment of steel in the days to follow.

The sewing machine could not be reached for comment. It may be quarantined and/or destroyed.