SAW, but without the creepy masks

Scene 1:

10 am. A garage workshop. Tools on a pegboard wall. Sawdust on the floor. A generally messy place. Cue music, something peaceful but with ominous undertones.

A sixty-something man walks into the scene. He's wearing a black sweatshirt. He whistles. He always whistles. Remarkably, he whistles rather well, not the tuneless noise that most home workshop guys make. His repertoire is deep, from classical tunes and phrases to show tunes to rock 'n' roll hits from the '60s and '70s. Popular music, he believes, fluttered out and died after What a Fool Believes.

Scene 2;

Close-up shot of a 10" table saw, its carbide tipped teeth exude efficiency and also menace as if to say 'Hey, we can cut both ways' whatever that might mean. 

Whistling Man approaches the saw with a three foot 2x4 in his hands. He needs a 2" wide piece of wood. He adjusts the guide. He flips the red switch beneath the saw. It whirs up to speed. The carbide teeth sing their keening refrain. 

But danger lurks within the three foot 2x4. Whistling Man does not know it.  

Whistling Man, it must be confessed, is cavalier about shop safety. He has not installed the plastic shield over the blade as the assembly instructions stressed. He does not use a notched piece of wood or even the plastic pusher thingee that came with the saw to guide the 2x4 past the spinning blade. No, he likes the hands-on feel of hands-on sawing. He feels that it gives him more control. 

At 13 minutes past 10 am, the spinning blade encounters the lurking danger within the three foot 2x4. It is a knot, diamond-hard. The spinning blade loses all ambition, stops, kicks the three foot 2x4 off the table, and resumes spinning. All this takes a fraction of a second and somewhere in that brief time frame Whistling Man's thumb meets the singing carbide teeth. The teeth welcome something softer than a diamond-hard knot to bite into and commence to remove about a 1/4" from the tip of Whistling Man's thumb. 

Scene 3:

Whistling man enters the house next to the garage workshop. His left thumb is firmly tucked into the right sleeve of his black sweatshirt. 

Whistling Man:

"I think we have to go to the emergency room."

His wife assesses the situation and springs into action. She drives Whistling Man to the local Urgent Care clinic.

Scene 4:

Whistling Man and his wife are in the Urgent Care waiting room where they read magazines. She leafs through Better Homes & Gardens, Whistling Man, awkwardly, pages through Guns & Ammo, though he has interest in neither Guns nor Ammo. 

Suddenly, a doctor appears. He evaluates Whistling Man's thumb wound and declares that he can probably jury rig something to at least stop the bleeding.

Doctor:

"Do you have the missing piece with you?"

Whistling Man:

"It's somewhere in the sawdust near the saw."

Scene 5:

The doctor, Whistling Man, and an attendant nurse type person go into a little room set up with a bed/table that's covered in crisp tissue paper. Whistling Man hops up, reclines, and offers his thumb for repairs.

The doctor fashions a small tourniquet from a rubber band and puts it around the base of Whistling Man's thumb. The bleeding slows. Then the doctor jabs a needle into the thumb and injects a magic numbing agent. The thumb numbs. 

Now comes the test of the doctor's sewing skills. He threads six stitches through to join the gaping flesh canyon walls to each other. But one segment close to the nail defies joinery. The doctor must drill through the nail to provide an anchor for the remaining two stitches. 

Finally, he's done. He removes the rubber band, slathers ointment over the stitches, and applies a white gauze hoodie over the mended thumb. 

Scene 6:

Whistling Man, his thumb, and wife are back in the car.

Whistling Man:

"Damn."

Scene 7, six weeks later:

The thumb stitches are out. The scab is mostly gone. There's a slight loss of feeling in the thumb tip that makes peeling an egg problematical. 

Whistling Man has used the evil table saw several times since the trauma, albeit with the plastic push stick provided. Whistling Man may be a slow learner but he's a learner nevertheless. 

He's typing this now. His thumb taps the space bar and, painlessly, spaces appear.