CASE # 1277

During my junior year of college, I worked at Common Ground, your typical slightly pretentious, poetry Wednesdays, on-campus coffee shop.

After burning myself several times on barista, I was demoted to sandwich girl.

Every morning I woke up dreading the lunch rush. Hundreds of cranky, stressed-out students waiting in line to talk to me about ham, apple, cheddar sandwiches and fruit smoothies.

One Monday, after running out of cheddar, I was sent to the stock room to retrieve more. The stock fridge was purchased in 1982 and had never been serviced. No one told me about the loose glass on the sliding door that wasn't quite attached to its frame.

Because the fridge was washed as seldom as it was serviced, chunks of crusted peanut butter and hunks of provologne clogged the track. Treating the shortage of cheddar as the emergency it was, I blew through the stock room, grabbed 3 more blocks of cheese and used all my strength to ram the fridge door closed as quickly as possible.

So quickly in fact, that I had no time to feel the tip of my left thumb get chopped off and stuck between the fridge's glass and frame. Of course, I realized this upon my return to the gag noises and green faces of my fellow Common Grounders.

Looking down to check if my fly was undone or something, I realized how profusely I was bleeding all over the cheddar. The cheese fell to the ground and I went into mild shock.

Collin Drylie, the barista on duty, caught me before I fell over and suggested we try to find the rest of my finger. Sure enough, there it was, stuck in the stock fridge amidst wilting spinach and chocolate milk cartons.

At the hospital, the doctors said the nub of my thumb could not be saved. They bandaged me up and told me it would grow back.

They were right. Four years later, my thumb has regrown a patch of skin that is both discolored and void of feeling.

Perhaps the whole experience was foreshadowing to the lactose intolerance I developed the next year. I still can't look at cheddar cheese.