Advisory to the reader: everything in this essay is true, the detail in the story may be too disturbing for sesitive readers.

Digital Bleeding
A true horror essay By Nickolaus A. Pacione

There are wounds one has received on the job in a sheet metal factory. The injuries one has tried to forget -- only to recall them in every gruesome detail as if it happened a day ago. March 26, 1996, will be the day I remember for the rest of my life because of a certain accident. This accident tore part of my finger off at the fingernail.

The work day started out like no other day -- walked into the locker room to change into my work clothes. The guys were sharing tales on how their friends fell into a vat of melted steel at their last factory job and seeing people get mangled in machinery. One of my co-workers was showing off an injury he received while working in a steel mill. This is a typical discussion to see who could scare the shit out of the next guy.

I came out of the locker room knowing that I was a half hour late -- but the boss never says anything. Like usual there were no tools around for me to use. I got started on the work order -- which was the gussets. I tried to find a wire wheel that worked but only to see that no one replaced the wheel yet -- I grabbed myself a pair of gloves to protect my hands since the parts are sharp as a razor blade before someone smoothes them out. I brought the box of gussets to the belt grinder. I was grinding the parts one by one trying to get them smooth.

I was doing this for the next two and a half hours until I felt a tugging at my glove and a tearing pain coming from my left hand. I continued working until I blood dripping from the grinder. I didn’t realize where it was coming from until I saw part of the glove was soaked with blood at the left index finger. The fingernail was torn off at the nail bed, leaving behind two flaps of the fingernail -- the right and left side of the fingernail.

“Fuck!” I shrieked -- I rushed myself over to my supervisor’s office. I ran over there and I was pale as a ghost. Tom walked me over to the first aid station and tried to stop the bleeding. They poured peroxide on the wound -- they told me not to look at it. After they bandaged it they rushed me over to the clinic in Addison, Illinois.

I arrived at the clinic about 9:30 a.m. I waited about 15 minutes before the doctor injected the numbing agent into my finger. It took three nurses to hold me down long enough to inject the medicine into my finger, the pain burned like the fires of hell. I was thinking just cut the God Damn finger off and get it over with because they were just playing with me as they were giving me the shot to numb the wound.

This part of the operate took the longest because it seem like an infinity before they called the doctor in -- the assholes took their time because they wanted to hear me suffer. The finally called my name to go into the room because they were going to remove the rest of the fingernail. I couldn’t feel a thing but the wound started bleeding again in the clinic. The entire floor was covered with blood.

When I walked into the room, There was a table full of surgical tools -- It felt like something out of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Re-Animater and Bride of The Re Animater. I have always had a bad vibe about doctor’s offices and hospitals, this vibe I had since I was sixteen after I broke my ring finger on my right hand playing basketball.

The doctor worked on my hand -- he was sort of a Dr. Frankenstein meets Norman Bates type of character. Surely he was a genus, but he stalled too much in helping me. The Doctor slowly cut a slit in my flesh so he could remove the rest of of the finger nail -- This looked like a charred piece of flesh hanging off a dead body. He put a temporary plate on the spot were it was wounded.

It was about 12 noon when they were finally finished. They told me to return two weeks later to change my dressings. My boss returned to pick me up from the clinic.

Two weeks later, I returned to the clinic to change the dressings on the wound -- this was a painful process since they had to remove the yellow gause on my finger. They slowly torured me by pulling the bandage off my finger. The dressings felt like a second skin and formed a cast around my finger when the nurse removed the top layer of gause. The finger looked like the mummy -- I use it for three weeks. This was when I took a lot a time off from work because the pain was unbearable. I would sit in Denny’s thinking about what had happened to my hand -- the horror stuck me what if I lost the entire finger. This thought had scared me countless times. When I returned to work the week after the accident I wouldn’t touch the grinder. I became very terrified around the power tool. I kept seeing what has happend to my finger. And told Tom to fix the machine so no one can get their fingers caught in the grinder. Every time I heard something about the grinder -- I thought about the digital bleeding. The horror I felt was something that Stephen King wrote about in a stort story titled The Mangler about a machine that was posessed by a blood thirsty demon, I recently watched this film and thought about what happened that day I was working for Remcor.

I became very paranoid when that grinder was turned on -- each time someone would use it to sand down a part I would see the same thing that would happen to someone else. This un nerving feeling haunted me after I finally shed off the bandages -- the machine that would cause a digital bleeding.

June 9,1997
copyright Nickolaus A. Pacione.
1997 writings from the grave.