I've got a target painted on my thumb

About six years ago, I made the mistake of trying to break up a cat fight.  Yup, put my hands between two very angry male cats to separate them and YOW! got bitten on the thumb.  Boy did it hurt.  I rinsed it under the faucet for a good five minutes figuring that would clean it out, and hoped for the best.

Less than twelve hours later, my thumb was starting to turn black.  A co-worker STRONGLY urged me to go to the quack to get some antibiotics.  I did, and they did the trick.  Except for one tiny thing.  I had a numb thumb for about two years.

"Oh, it's just a little nerve damage.  It'll go away in a couple of months," the nurse practitioner said.  But a few months turned into more than twenty four before the very annoying numbness went away.

Fast forward six years and three months.  There's Lorna standing on a ladder, hummingbirds whizzing by her head, angry she's taking up the feeder right before their long trip south, wresting with an ancient pair of pruning shears and hacking at a bunch of small branches on a tree that is desperately trying to live. 

We had this dangerous Siberian elm cut down about six years ago because it would drop big branches with just a breath of wind.  We figured we didn't want to be squashed in the middle of the night so in came Mr. Tree Surgeon.  Well, we had all but about 15 feet of it cut down.  The whole deforestation project (two trees severely pruned, one decimated) split between between three parties was $6,000+.  It was going to cost another $1,000 if we took that last fifteen feet of tree down.  So there it stands next to our cottage to this day.  We keep saying we're going to have a chain saw artist come and so something with it, but that would probably cost as much or more than having it cut and hauled away.  So every summer it tries to live by shooting out as many branches as it can manage, which we hack away every September.

So there I was on Sunday morning, hacking away at the tiny branches (the bigger ones came later) and I pinched my thumb in the shears.  It was a particularly thick branch, but it was too small for the saw, so I clenched the shears in both hands and -- YOW!!! -- got my thumb pinched.  It hurt!  And now there's a blood blister . . . right on the exact same spot where Chester bit me. 

Guess what?  I've got a numb thumb again.

And how did your weekend go?