Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while and I just wanted to let you all know that I haven’t been slain by a group of heroes or anything like that. Nope, I am one goblin that is too smart to be killed like any other cannon fodder goblin. But even though I am still alive, I was wounded, but let me start at the beginning.

After my divorce last year I moved in with my mother so I could help her out with the cleaning and shopping and that kind of stuff. See my mom is Agoraphobic. Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by symptoms of anxiety in situations where the person perceives their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape. These situations can include open spaces, public transit, shopping centers, or simply being outside their home. Strangely enough her Agoraphobia started when a truck crashed in to my house back in 2009 at that time she lived with me and my family. So you would think she would have a fear of being home not a fear of leaving it but anyway back to my story.

On October 5^th  my mom had a stroke and since we live in a small town up in the mountains they helicoptered her a hundred miles away to the Stroke center at a hospital in Scottsdale Arizona just outside Phoenix.

Since we live so far away and my mom has dogs that need to eat I couldn’t stay down there every day.  By October 7^th  I had hardly slept at all but I had run home to feed the dogs and get some things for my mom and myself. As I was pulling out storage boxes from under my bed I hit the folding bracket that is supposed to keep a bed leg from folding up with my elbow. While I was still waving my arm around and cussing loudly the bed leg folded abruptly with a loud SNIP sound.  A few seconds later while still holding my elbow I noticed drops of blood on the floor. As I was trying to look at my elbow to see how bad it was bleeding I started to feel a LOT of pain coming from my left pointer finger.

As you may have guessed that SNIP sound was the tip of my finger being cut off. My first thought was GOD DAMIT I don’t have time for this shit. Second thought was, Well this is going to suck. So I grabbed some paper towels and wrapped them around my bleeding finger and drove to the hospital.

I figured they would just stitch it up and I would be on my way, boy was I wrong. After they cleaned it up a bit and had a good look they told me what I had done was called “Degloving” From the last knuckle to the tip of the finger I had striped all the skin off but left most of the bone. They wanted to drive me in an ambulance down to a hospital in Phoenix for the surgery. I told them no way! If I didn’t have the exposed bone I would have just pinched the skin and superglued it together like I did when I ripped my thumb print off with a rubber mallet. (long story) It healed fine but with no skin to glue I would need the surgery. But there was not a chance in hell I would go without my car and be stuck 100 miles from home and like 20 miles from the hospital my mom was at, so I told them I would drive myself…… Without anything to dull the pain…….

Have you ever been driving down a twisty mountain road in the middle of the night and while making those twisty turns you are painfully reminded of your recently severed finger as the stump hits the blinker stick? If not I suggest you don’t try it. It wasn’t enjoyable at all no matter how many times I did it.

The surgery went fine and I was able to get over to the hospital my mom was at by 3:00pm. My eldest son and my daughter both live in Scottsdale and had been driving back and forth between the 2 hospitals all day. They took a few before and after photos. (Warning they are graphic)

I am so happy that my daughter has my sense of humor, I was not awake 5 minutes before she was teasing me. That is her holding a glove with the finger tied off.

When I finally got home that night I found the missing part of me under the bed and immediately started trying to invent a new version of the magic finger trick  I think it would have looked really cool but unfortunately my dead flesh mummified itself within a few days.

But getting back to my mom she was in the hospital for about a week and was then sent to a rehab hospital also in Scottsdale for 2 more weeks. Then we got her shipped to a rehab up here in Payson. I was so happy that I wouldn’t need to be driving so much, but we soon realized that the place sucked.  So I took her home the day before Thanksgiving. The first morning at home when she woke up was the first time I had seen her smile since the stroke. So even though I am exhausted by being a 24/7 care giver it was worth it.

With all the craziness and my not posting any reviews for a while you might be thinking I haven’t been reading much. Well you would be kind of correct. I think there was only one actual book that I read the whole time. It was Mercury’s Son by Luke E.T. Hindmarsh  and I have to say it was pretty fricken awesome, I rate it 5 stars. But just because I wasn’t reading doesn’t mean I wasn’t …. Um…. Reading…. I was just doing it with my ears. I think I listened to close to 20 audio books as well as a re-listen to the Stormlight series and Lightbringer series but this time around they were both in Graphic Audio.

But of the 20 or so AB there were a few that really stood out that I want to mention now even though I do plan on writing full reviews for them, Straight Outta Fangton by one of my favorite authors and frequent guest of the blog C.T. Phipps. I like to think that the line “There was a naked goblin walking down the street spouting beat poetry” was written just for me. Because for some reason it had me literally laughing out loud for an annoyingly long time.  Priest of Bones by Peter Mclean was just outstanding. Skyward by Brandon Sanderson is more for a younger audience but I still got pulled in quickly.

I gave all three of those books 5 stars and you should pick up one or all of them now instead of waiting around for my reviews to be posted because having to help my mom with one thing or another every couple of hours all night every night has been making me extremely sleep deprived. That sleep deprivation has been making it hard to write anything. Well that and the fact that I have to learn to type all over again. LOL I can’t even hunt and peck because I keep trying to use the wrong finger. It is weird I have no feeling on almost the whole tip because it was grafted from my arm skin, but where the finger skin starts every touch sends jolts of pain down to my wrist. Hopefully that will go away soon, but nerve damage can last forever. But even if it hurts I promise to keep bringing you (hopefully) entertaining book reviews and author interviews.  Thanks for sticking around.