Festering Carbuncle

my day in pictures, again, in a chronological fasion

hook in hand

Excerpt from In Each Job an Achilles' Heel by Paige Parker, The Oregonian, Sept. 22, 2007

One hour into his shift, Brian Harvey's hands gripped the broom as he swept the grain elevator's floor clean. A conveyor belt rattled above him. A 36-horsepower industrial squirrel cage fan, missing its safety guard, whirred behind him. He drew his arm back to push the broom forward, one hand at the top of the handle.

Something caught.

"The first blade comes around and cracks the skin. The second blade comes around and takes the joints. The third blade . . ." Harvey's voice trails off.

"There was no clean cut about it. It was all taken off in a series of vicious blows."

Alone in the basement, Harvey saw the blood pool beneath his work boots and knew he had to find help.

His legs carried him up a flight of stairs, through a doorway, down one short staircase and up another. Around silos, across railroad tracks, around a train.

About 20 yards from an office, his feet crunched on gravel, and his legs gave way. He splashed blood on a nearby window to catch someone's attention.

Then he passed out.

Harvey woke up at Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center, his hand wrapped in bandages. His brother had managed to find three of his fingers in the grain elevator's dust recovery system. Doctors tried to reattach one, but the damage was too severe.

After three days, doctors sent Harvey home. Before the bandages came off, Harvey convinced himself that maybe his injury wasn't that bad. Then he saw what was left.

The son of a North Bend marine clerk, Harvey was "born with a hook in his hand," but now, his name was removed from the list of eligible casual longshoremen. Though he was right-handed, Harvey struggled to spearfish, hunt or play soccer. Without a thumb, he couldn't use a spoon.

"My hand -- to a male, it goes back to being a caveman," Harvey says. "It's in your psyche. It's a tool."

He replayed the moment of his injury constantly. Phantom pains racked his hand. Harvey says it took years of psychoanalysis to accept his injury.

"You just cannot ever imagine your hand disappearing one day," he says. "It's not even possible."

Eleven months after his injury, a San Francisco surgeon harvested the big toe from Harvey's left foot and the second toe from his right and attached them to his hand, fashioning a grip. With that surgery, and about 300 sessions with a physical therapist, Harvey regained more than half the use of his hand. Insurance through his union covered his medical bills. Workers' compensation covered his living expenses.

Three years later, after Harvey threatened legal action, his employer rehired him. He worked for eight years as a longshoreman and is now the union's drug and alcohol director.

His first day back, Harvey had to pull a shift in the same grain elevator where he'd nearly died. On his lunch break, he took a trip alone to the basement.

"I just wanted to face it," he says. "You know how you get back on that horse and face your fears? I stood there for a while, and it all flashed back to me. I thought to myself, 'Man I was lucky I made it out of there.' "

To prove how far he's come, Harvey reaches across a desk.

"Shake my left hand," he insists. His grip is so strong, it hurts.

today (sorted by chronology):

The other night (documented photographically)

With the way my job works, a lot of time can pass between the last time you work with somebody and the next time you work with them.  Sometimes this is a blessing, other times it can kind of suck, but mostly it just means that I get to work with a lot of different people and mostly don't have to be around any of them long enough to get sick of them.  In any case, recently I worked with this guy who likes to read books, and I don't mean like no supermarket paperbacks, but real, honest to goodness lit'rature.  So, were down in the hold of a rail ship and he asks me, he says, "So, now that you got your promotion did you quit reading."  "No!" I said, "the last thing I read was... Well... Fuck, I guess I did quit reading, but I guess I make up for it by still writing.  Oh, wait, I don't write anymore either...  hmm... Well, I still watch cartoons.  Yeah, I watch the fuck out of 'em"

So, I get to thinking about this whole exchange the other day, about how I don't read or write much anymore and how it is all work's fault.  I think of D. Boon's lamentations on the soul crushing nature of the workaday life and I feel like a hero, or a martyr, or something.  But then I think of the passage in Bread and Roses that tells about the philosophical atmosphere in the shoemaker's shop, the days spent reading and discussing the masterworks of the greatest minds of all generations, and I can't help but think that maybe it's not work's fault.  I consider this for a moment before I remember those pictures I saw on the tv of Chris Benoit's brain.  Man that guy's brain was all sorts of fucked up.  They said it was from concussions.  So I get to thinking, I wonder what my brain looks like.  I figure it's all sorts of fucked up too, with like, big dead spots that don't do anything anymore, remnants of long lost abilities like maths, empathy, and deductive reasoning.

But anyways, more work pictures, because I know that everybody loves me, and by extension, everything I do and see.

Two spouts in one hatch, 'cause we're crazy like that.

A bridge!

Another bridge!

Ship's gear!

This is where Jesus carried me

last nite (in pictures)

I let my flickr account lapse or something when the whole yahoo changeover thing took place.  I don't know, it just kind of pissed me off that in order to keep on doing what I had been doing I had to go set up an account with yahoo so that I could continue to not use any of the services that yahoo provides.  Fact is, I already have a yahoo account, but I can remember neither the login nor the password, probably because there is just so much damn great stuff offered by yahoo that I never logged out.  I can't remember, exactly, but damn, I'm starting to miss that little flickr thing.  I'm starting to think about getting the whole thing fixed up by setting up a new yahoo account, but I'm waiting for a time when I can kind of do it behind my own back, when I'm not paying much attention so that I don't have to swallow my pride, or live down the guilt, or whatever it is the kids are calling it these days.  So, no flickr means that I have to resort to the next best option, which is, of course, picture post, woot!*

*I don't even know what 'woot' means, and I am appropriately ashamed of myself for using it.

From the looks of things I spent the night driving a truck around a container yard?

See, most of this is actually a picture of a mirror, which is like, I don't know, a total mindfuck.

Look!  A bunch of trucks and some cranes and a ship.  Rad.

Aw, a sunrise like romantic love.

Lots of high tech instruments, gizmos, and dodads are in the truck cab.

Outside the truck cab things become more low tech, but blurriness is still a major issue.

Wha?  Two ships??  wow!