This was a first - physical discomfort and nausea from a spoken story

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Weird, weird (and unpleasant) experience today.

We were out at a business lunch with one of our suppliers today. The conversation was light and pleasant. The head salesman, “Jim” - I like him. He’s friendly, honest, and a decent guy. Things were going great. Until:

My boss asks, “Hey Jim, didn’t you have an injury recently? What was that again, and how’s it going?”

Jim: “Yeah, I hurt my finger. My son and I were carrying a concrete slab, but it got too heavy for him and he had to drop it. I was bending down to set it down gently, but the drop made the corner fall directly on my index finger and it mangled it.”

Sounds awful, but then it got really bad for me. I’m not going to retell the whole story, but the main points were these (gross, but only like 10% as horrifying as he actually told it):

[ul]
[li]The slab fell directly on his index finger.[/li][li]The finger was split down the middle. Like through the bone.[/li][li]He saw the bone, his young daughter saw it and fainted.[/li][li]He felt nothing. This is a big red flag.[/li][li]He wrapped the thing in one of those sports ice-packs[/li][li]Drove himself to the hospital[/li][li]Filled out paperwork, etc. Waited about 20 minutes for the nurse to show up. When she did, and unwrapped his injury, “Oh fuck, it’s frozen solid”[/li][li]The term “bloodsicle” was used more than a few times[/li][li]When he saw it, he told the nurse “Oh fuck, there’s no saving that. Just cut it off.”[/li][li]She had to run the mangled mess under warm tap water to thaw it until they could try to operate[/li][li]Once it did thaw, he fainted from the pain of running water on exposed meat, bone and marrow[/li][li]They somehow managed to bind this crushed mess into something resembling a finger[/li][li]While healing, ALL the skin fell off the affected digit. Thrice.[/li][li]What’s left is a grotesque mess that crudely resembles a finger. After nearly a year of healing, he has a skin-colored appendage with no feeling and little movement.[/li][li]He told us all of the gory details (and I’ve left much of them out) over lunch.[/li][li]While constantly showing me this deformed, mangled finger[/li][/ul]

This has never happened to me before, but the telling of the story, and details, made me physically sick. Pale, sweating, feeling awful. I mean, I was about two seconds away from having to flee the table because I was about to vomit. My co-worker (and friend) noticed it too - “OMG, I saw you go completely ashen. When I saw you put your hand to your mouth I was sure you were going to lose it.”

What the hell? This guy RELISHED telling the story. And my other co-workers LOVED it. I told them how sickened I was by the whole thing, and they were shocked. “Really? I thought it was interesting!”

WTF is wrong with “Jim”? And WTF is wrong with me? I was this close to vomiting just from a story, and that’s never happened before.

2

Sometimes someone just hits a “nerve” with you in how good they are at painting that mental picture, or maybe it was just something that triggers an “omg!” reaction in you. I can make people start wincing by describing eye-related injuries that I’ve seen/heard about. A friend of mine in high school was doing an interpretive reading of the story “Gray Matter” (I think it’s by Stephen King) and just the way he was describing an oozing mass and using a slightly gurgling voice - ugh, I wasn’t as close as you to getting sick, but it was pretty bad regardless.

3

I can tell you why “Jim” enjoyed telling the story. It’s the same reason little old ladies like to tell you about their hernia operations. When one goes through something frightening and painful and get through it, they feel somehow heroic. They want other people to see how brave they were.
He no longer hears the horror in the tale. He knows if he can get through it anyone can.

4

I used to work for a company which would have “Safety Days” twice a year. Shift workers would get the night off on Thursday, then Friday morning we got Safety presentations, lunch at a good restaurant and little gifts for people who’d had a “5th anniversary with the company” (5, 10…) in the last 6 months. Weekend shift got Saturday off.

One year the subjects of the presentations were head injuries and hand injuries. The EHS manager started saying “when I got these I thought ‘really? :rolleyes:’ Seriously, you people, there is no need to make Corporate right!”

In the two weeks between his receipt of the slides and the actual presentations, we’d had two “injuries with medical leave”, a worker who’d bumped his head and suffered a minor concussion, another who’d taken his gloves off while shuffling around some metal barrels and suffered an injury similar to the one described in the OP.

Both of them were asked to explain the accidents - the bumped head had people trying to “do like a turtle” in sympathy, but the smooshed finger saw us going all kind of colors humans aren’t supposed to be. The telling, knowing the guys, and both of them very expressive, had much more of an effect than the pictures on the slides: those made people go “yeeech” but they were impersonal, not as real as having your mate tell you ‘and that’s when I did this totally stupid thing…’

5

Dude. I’m trying to eat here!

6

Fingers are a powerful symbol, deeply resonant within our minds. Not surprising a story about one getting mangled would affect you strongly.

One of my enduring childhood memories (A check of the IMDB tells me I couldn’t have been more than nine) is of an episode of a crappy old TV show (Iron Horse) in which a man mangles another’s hands with a blacksmith’s hammer. Ooooooooog. :eek::eek::eek:

7

I completely agree, injuries having to do with hands/fingers can hit a visceral nerve for some people that nothing else approaches. It’s the reason why I can’t eat chicken or duck feet, despite the fact that they’re delicacies to the rest of my family – they resemble human hands too much for my appetite. :frowning:

I remember being horrified once at a scene in an independent film in which a woman playfully bites off a man’s finger…it came off like putty in her mouth. The rest of the movie involved typical gory things like hacking and sewing body parts together, which didn’t bother me a bit; it was the hand thing that sickened me.

Seems like your co-worker wasn’t skimping on the gory details either, which can also hit a nerve. Reminds me of a Chuck Palahniuk anecdote in which reading a certain explicitly detailed excerpt from his book Haunted caused audience members to faint dead away.

8

Drums or flats?

9

I’ve noticed this a lot more as I get older. I used to be the kid wiggling her tooth to gross out the adults, dangling it by its roots and twisting it around, and now I’m the one gagging a bit when I even think of it.

The real test: try reading this story by Chuck Palahniuk (can’t find a link to the story, though I’m sure it exists, just him writing about how many people faint when they hear it).

10

I don’t know about fainting, but I can’t even read that story in print without having to stop because I feel like I’m in imminent danger of hurling. I don’t think I could sit in an audience and listen to him read it (though I did listen to him reading one almost as gross, called “Hot Potting,” and was okay with that one. The particularly oogy thing was that both of these were inspired by true stories).

The only other one that’s affected me like that (and I love gory horror stories–I’m a Graham Masterton story, and his gore makes Stephen King’s look like Mother Goose for the most part) is in the Stephen King story “Gerald’s Game,” where the protagonist


has to peel the skin off her hands in order to get out of handcuffs

I seriously thought I’d lose it while reading that. I doubt I could listen to it spoken.

11

I don’t know about fainting, but I can’t even read that story in print without having to stop because I feel like I’m in imminent danger of hurling. I don’t think I could sit in an audience and listen to him read it (though I did listen to him reading one almost as gross, called “Hot Potting,” and was okay with that one. The particularly oogy thing was that both of these were inspired by true stories).

The only other one that’s affected me like that (and I love gory horror stories–I’m a Graham Masterton story, and his gore makes Stephen King’s look like Mother Goose for the most part) is in the Stephen King story “Gerald’s Game,” where the protagonist


has to peel the skin off her hands in order to get out of handcuffs

I seriously thought I’d lose it while reading that. I doubt I could listen to it spoken.

Oh, and here’s “Guts,” for those who dare. Be warned, it really is pretty horrific.

12

I work in a hospital, and sometimes the patients take great pride in the retelling of their tales. Most of us are happy to listen.

Around my workplace, that dude’s story would probably have resulted in more exclamations of “Cool!” or “Wow!” than any expressions of dismay.