Oops

My oldest caught the pinkie on her right hand in the door of the truck. She tried to shake it off, but her threshold of pain is pretty low (she tends to faint too) so she couldn't hang with the finger in the shape that it was in. Through a consultation with the school nurse, we decided to get it looked at, so she met me at home. Her finger was in sad shape. The french nail she had on was punctured at the nail bed and it was swollen with blood. The nail bed was a delightful shade of reddish blue (purple for you "artistes").
We went to the local ER and the PA (we'll call him Dr. Apu) drilled a small hole in the nail bed to release the pressure. It took him a while (he didn't seem to understand that the french manicure was on top of her real fingernail, which explained why it took him far longer to drill the hole than I believe he thought it would take) to get the hole made, but finally blood started to come out.
Then they took the largest finger splint they could find and bent it in half to cover the end of the finger and the nail and wrapped it with some tape. It looked ridiculous. She held her pinkie up in the air like some affected snob at a tea party.
Oh, and she plans to attend Color Guard practice tonight. I told her that she was nuts and she was more than likely to injure her finger further. I sent her back to school. We only spent about 90 minutes in the ER. Quite a feat.

Clark