When Hilary was about 9 months old, my mom one day had ordered Leslie and I to clean up our room (we all shared a room when we lived in our little house in CA) because we have always been messy even when we were little. So Leslie and I were trying to clean while Hilary was doing her best to try and eat some crayons that were on the floor. I picked her up and put her down on the floor just outside the room and started to close the door so she couldn't get back in. As the door slid closed I heard the most awful shriek I have ever heard. I opened up the door to see blood gushing from her tiny little pinkie finger and a pool of blood forming on the ground. Of course my mom had come running and was shocked when she picked up her infant and went running to the kitchen to see the top of Hilary's finger dangling by just a small strip of skin. Apparently Hilary had reached her hand up to the door and put her hand on the lower hinge right at the moment I had closed it. Pinch-a-roo and the top of her finger was neatly lopped almost all the way off.
What happened next is very foggy in my memory. I remember a trail of blood down the hallway, crying hysterically as I kneeled on the floor of the car holding a dishrag to Hilary's finger shrieking "I CUT OFF HER FINGER!!!" while my mom trying to reassure me that I didn't cut off her finger while she drove wildly to my grandma's house (just around the block) to drop us off and pick up my uncle who accompanied her to the ER, and the long, long wait to find out if I'd really cut off my sister's finger for good.
When my parents finally returned to my grandma's house Hilary was exhausted and had a giant club hand that was wrapped up tightly with gauze and medical tape. After hours spent in the ER with a hand specialist & plastic surgeon they were able to run a metal rod down her pinkie finger and reattach the top of her finger with many tiny little stitches and now it was just a matter of waiting to see how her hand would heal. Since she was so little they weren't sure how it would go...would she lose all feeling in her finger, would she lose her fingernail permanently, would she be able to bend her finger appropriately...only time would tell.
I am happy to report that Hilary's finger healed nicely and you can barely tell that anything happened. If you look reallllllly closely you can see a little line all the way around her finger right near her first knuckle where the stitches went all the way around and although her fingernail is a little wonky you probably wouldn't notice unless you knew what had happened and looked at it closely. And Hilary also has the upside of permanently being able to hold it over my head that I cut off her finger, thereby trumping nearly anything she could possibly ever do to me.
Definitely not my best moment of childhood, but glad that it worked out ok for the finger in the end and that future generations of Briggs kids will know the dangers of closing doors.
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