Slammed a door on my finger

Last Friday, I experienced the third most painful experience in my life.  As I was walking out of Joanna's Chinese school classroom, I remembered that the heavy door slams very loudly.  Not wanting to disturb her classroom, I reached my hand in at the last minute to try to stop the door from slamming.  My timing was late, and my right middle finger was the casualty.  I experienced a pain as sharp as when I was having a contraction.   Most likely a 10 on those doctors scales.  I looked at my fingernail and it was gushing blue in front of my eyes.  Normally, pain subsides eventually , and this happened at 7:30 at night.  Well, at 12:30 that night, my finger was still throbbing in pain.   There was no way I could fall asleep.  Feeling a little irrational and desperate, I decided to to try to compress my finger.  Instead the pain shaprened.  Then I decided to compress the base of my finger.  I later found out that was a really bad idea, because it caused my finger to swell even more.  However, I was starting to become a little delusional and couldn't correlate that mistake to my pain increasing.  I then decided to stare at my finger and I realized that the source of my pain was my fingernail.  I asked my husband to help me cut off my entire fingernail, but he refused.

So I decided to go to the ER at 1:00 AM.   I know it looked silly to go in for one finger, but that small spot on my hand was causing so much pain!  Following me at the ER was a couple to be married the next day.  For some reason, the groom-to-be had a black eye from a rehearsal gone wild and needed stitches .  So I didn't feel as silly being in the ER.  Anyway, I discovered that night that the standard procedure for what I was experiencing was to poke a little hole through the nail.  So after I had my standard 3 x-rays, the doctor just used a little needle and poked my nail.  Immediately, blood game gushing out and I felt a wonderful sense of relief.  Who would have known such a simple trick could help me feel so much better.  Incidentally, I discovered that night that this is a very common first-aid technique, and all the nurses seemed to tell me what to do when it happened.  But they encouraged me to stay to watch the doctor do it so I can learn.  

The next day, my finger was still oozing all the way till dinner time.  It still oozed occassionally the next few days.  But it's amazing that my once purple finger nail looks almost normal now.