Four days before Christmas I burned my fingers. It was a dumb thing to do. I grabbed an iron by the part designed to produce 10 different levels of trouser-smoothing heat. As a result, four of the fingers on my left hand sprouted burn blisters, most of them right up in the folds of my finger joints, aka my “fingerpits.”

Did this iron have a handle? Indeed. Why didn’t I just grab the handle as opposed to the scalding hot metal side? That’s none of your beeswax, friend. Let’s just all agree that, on this particular day, Mike had a perfectly good reason to hold an iron by the wrong end, as well as a perfectly good expectation that it would be as cool as a garden-fresh cucumber. That said, I burned my fingers, and it was a dumb thing to do, and it hurt a lot.

I haven’t talked about the incident too much. This isn’t because I’m embarrassed. No, I keep (relatively) quiet about it because of what happened to my wife later that night. See, my wife did something far more painful, way less dumb, and significantly more badass.

The night of the day of the Great Finger Roast, we were up pretty late. Shannon was busy creating handmade gifts for loved ones on her trusty ol’ Kenmore sewing machine. This thing is a total tank. It’s metal, it weighs a ton, and it’s powerful. I’m pretty sure there’s a machine gun port somewhere on the side. Shannon got the thing years ago at a garage sale for about 20 bucks.

It was getting close to 2am, and I’d been passed out on the couch for at least an hour while Shannon kept working on a special Christmas gift for a special person. She was very happy with how it was turning out, and I was very happy with how I was fast asleep dreaming of sugar plum fairies flitting around with trays of peanut butter cups and beer. Until I woke up.*

“Mike, I need help.” What? “I need help.”

Shannon was standing over me, holding her hand. When she saw I was awake, she headed into the bright lights of the kitchen. I followed close behind. She showed me her middle finger.

Later, Shannon said it had been a dumb, careless thing to do. But I choose to believe she was attempting to pull off some risky sewing maneuver called The Crazy Inga.

There was a tiny bit of blood around a tiny rod of metal .... sticking straight out of her finger nail. Yep, her sewing machine had plunged its needle directly into her finger, and as she recoiled, she had broken it free of the machine. Later, Shannon said it had been a dumb, careless thing to do. But I choose to believe she was attempting to pull off some risky sewing maneuver called The Crazy Inga.**  

“Should we pull it out or leave it in?” she asked. Finding a confidence I didn’t know I had, I boldly proclaimed, “Let’s get it out.”

I got some pliers from a junk drawer and decided to clamp onto the needle while she pulled her finger off it. I have no clue if this was the best course of action, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be the one who pulled it out crooked or something, so I gallantly laid that responsibility at Shannon’s feet.

Anyway, I pinched the needle while Shannon yanked her finger off as fast as she could. Then she looked at it and made a “humph” kind of face. There was a drop or two of blood. She told me it didn’t really hurt.

I’d like to pause for just a moment so we may all take note of my wife’s pain threshold. It’s high. Like, really high. As in, I get little to no sympathy when I sustain minor injuries such as fingerpit burns from grabbing the hot side of an iron.***

If a doctor asks her to rate the pain she’s in on a scale of one to ten, her response is usually, “Hmm, I don't know, so maybe a   … two?” which is the same thing as saying, “Hmm, I feel just fine, but I also feel like I should say a number to make you feel like you’re doing your job, so maybe a   … two?”

So it came as little surprise to me when, a half hour and a phone call to Urgent Care later, Shannon was busily knitting a different special Christmas gift for a different special someone. Unfortunately, a trip to the doctor the next day confirmed that the needle had broken while inside Shannon’s finger – the tip was still in there, but had just narrowly missed her bone. The nurse asked if she could show the X-ray to the other nurses.**** Shannon agreed.

An X-ray a nurse would like to show off to other nurses. I have never been more proud.

And Shannon has yet to complain about the pain –  not even once. And hey, did I mention that it’s been over a week and half since all this happened, and the needle is still in her finger? It’s true. As I write this, that sharp piece of thread-injecting metal is still stowed away in the tip of Shannon’s finger. The hospital was booked full of surgeries, so the doctors said, as long as the pain wasn’t too bad, she could wait for the next opening. Two weeks later.

By the time you read this, the needle will be out. Maybe they’ll let her keep it. If not, we’ll still have that badass X-ray to help us remember the whole debacle. Although, something tells me Shannon won’t need any help remembering –  I’ll be bragging about her baddassery on the sewing machine for years to come.  
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* After, I’m told, lots of vigorous shaking and calling of my name.
** Which has only been successfully completed one time – 50 years ago in communist Russia – by a master seamstress named Inga Insanovich.
*** Despite having a perfectly good reason for grabbing it that way.
**** And you can see it now – that’s the actual X-ray up there in the picture.