I am normally all thumbs when it comes to typing, but today I'm even worse, so please bear with me because as I type this.

I am working with one of my fingers trussed up like a little turkey.

Last Saturday I did what one is never supposed to do with a power tool; I got careless. And as everyone should know, even one moment of carelessness can result in a lifetime of regret, especially when soft things come into to contact with very sharp, spinning things.

Even though I have been around and have used table saws since I was a kid, and even though I was trained in the safe operation of one in junior high school, I still screwed up.

And now I have ten stitches to remind me of it.

Last week, helping my friend John, I was cutting some two by four lumber with a portable table saw and near the end of the cut, instead of pushing the wood through with a stick I reached around to pull the wood through to finish the cut. Big mistake.

Because the piece was only a couple of inches wide, I continued to steady it with my right hand. That's when the saw took its toll and the blade caught my right thumb and went in, around my thumbnail almost up to the first knuckle.

The next fifteen minutes are (fortunately) a blur to me now.

Hollering for help, blood and profanity, stomping around in circles. Tremendous pain. Being stuffed into a van, a dirty rag around my entire hand, me trying to find the vein that stops the flow of blood. Then nausea and mild shock as we got stuck in traffic, the noonday heat boring into my forehead, weird looks from other motorists at stoplights as we forced our way through.

Then the coolness of the ER with other people there, some on stretchers and likely in worse condition than myself.

After a while, a nurse saw me leaning against the wall, sweating and trembling in line for admission. She made me sit down in a wheelchair and soon after they wheeled me into a room with a bed. Someone was singing a Motown song, "Stop...in the name of love," and there was the oddness of normal nurse banter mixed with throbbing and a feeling of vertigo.

"...So I thought it was a size 5 but I ended up back at the mall...he looks pretty gray... 'Hey..are you going to pass out on us?'...lets get a bag going and..."

A young man came to ask me questions. Insurance? Yes. Contact my wife? Please, no. In the blur, my friend John walked in.

"Will he be ok?" Reassured from the nurses, he takes my phone and the bloody towel. "Call me when you're ready." Can I get something for the pain? Man, I am dumb. Nurse: "You're not dumb, we've seen a lot of table saw injuries this week." Something for the pain? Anything?

Back at home and woozy with Percocet, the lidocaine still numbing up the digit, I operate the computer. I look up 'table saw injuries' and find an alarming statistic: The US Consumer Product Safety Commission reports over thirty thousand injuries a year involving table saws, with three thousand of those resulting in amputation.

The insurance industry reports nearly two billion dollars in table saw injury related costs. Clearly I am lucky. I have ten stitches, but I still have my thumb.

Further reading reveals an invention. Some clever person has developed a table saw that will not cut flesh.

It sounds fantastic and unreal, but the testimonials and videos look good. It is a saw blade/motor combination that, upon contact with human flesh, stops the blade within milliseconds, turning what could be an amputation into a minor cut.

SawStop is a company formed by the inventor, Stephen Gass, after he encountered difficulty in getting acceptance for his invention because of reluctance from major manufacturers due to idea that adding the special brake to some saws and not to others creates a potential for lawsuits.

Today, over five years since the SawStop was introduced, none of the major manufacturers have signed on to add the invention to their tooling or products. Inventor Gass claims it comes down to money.

"They cannot figure out how to make more money by adding SawStop. They are not paying for the injuries that occur now, so why should they spend money to change their product to eliminate a cost they aren't bearing?"

Hopefully this will change and this product will become widely available and reasonably priced.

As it is, the SawStop is being manufactured by Gass' company and you can buy one semi-locally in Portland and bring it home in your truck, or buy directly from the company. I'm counting my pennies, and lucky for me, I can still get to ten with both hands.