Ouch
I held up my right hand in a hitchhiking motion, waving it back and forth underneath the white light, trying to catch a glint at the tip of my thumb where a prickly sting was coming from. I was annoyed. I’d launched my thumb straight into the shattered glass cover on my phone screen, which had been aggressively reminding me to replace it by stabbing me multiple times already.
The only person I knew who could get the shard out was my in-house surgeon, d. Tucked inside his portable surgical kit for prying open sick laptops were dissecting screwdrivers of every size and shape, plastic picks to crack tight boards open, and, of course, precision tweezers. I’d seen those same tweezers shift header pins into melted solder on PCB boards, and flick tiny components off mid-desolder.
Now, my thumb was going under the knife, too.
d wrangled my right thumb, nearly twisting it off at the joint to catch the glimmer. When he finally did, he prodded it with the needle tips of the tweezers, then scraped with the flat edge of the metal tool, squeezing the piece out. I wailed in distress like a dramatic husky, but d kept pushing against the invisible sword wedged in my skin. My increasingly high-pitched shrieks were indications that d was near.
Then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and ran his thumb over mine.
Do you feel anything?
I guess not.
Just like that, the shard was out, caught somewhere in his hairy legs.