This happened nearly half a lifetime ago, and yet, I remember it like it was yesterday.

When I was in high school (around 17), I was cleaning out my parent's basement, and decided I wanted a beer. My parents were very laid back about me drinking - most of my friend's parents were the "we'll buy you beer, but if we do, then we'll also drive you where ever you're going" kind of parents, and since my friend group was small and close-knit, this worked out well.

For the purposes of this story, it highlights that my parents had zero problem with me drinking alcohol, so it's not like I did what I did because I was hiding. It was pure stupidity.

Anyways, I want a beer. There is beer in the beer fridge in the garage, which is up a half flight of stairs from the basement. I go and get the beer from the fridge. But all we had at the time was bottles with pop tops. No big deal, I'll use the pop top opener that's attached to the fridge. Except it's gone. So to open this beer, I'd now need to go up 2 more half flights of stairs to the kitchen (split level home), and that just sounded like a boring waste of time.

I head back down into the basement to see what I can use to open this beer bottle.

I find my dad's vise attached to his work table and I think "Hey, I can use the vise to hold the beer, and then find some tool to pry the lid off of". Sounds like a plan.

So I do this. I secure the beer with the vise, then look around to find something to pry the bottle top off. There's a set of pliers nearby, so this seems perfect.

I manage to get a good grip on one end of the bottle lid with the pliers and proceed to try to lever the top off using horizontal force (the way you would with an actual bottle opener).

The next thing I know, the metal lid is off...so is most of the neck of the bottle. I somehow snapped the neck of the bottle, midway down. It broke very suddenly, being glass, and when the bottle broke, I dropped the pliers. Also, the force of snapping the bottle neck caused the beer to foam up and shoot out of the bottle a bit, splashing me with beer.

As I'm standing there, startled, I notice my fingers feel weird, and I look at them. I raise my hand, fingers straightened, and notice that three of my fingers have these weird, bloodless cuts on them. It looks almost like really deep paper cuts. I flex my fingers experimentally, and when I do, blood shoots out. Literally squirts out of my fingers. I'm surprised, so I straightened my fingers again. The cuts go back to being bloodless and pristine - all the blood literally spurted off. So I do it again, because I'm probably in shock a little and thinking "Did I really just see that?". Yep, I did. Blood shoots out again. But this time, when I straighten my fingers again, the blood starts just cascading out of my fingers, down my hand, down my arm, and dripping onto the basement floor.

I then spend the next few minutes doing what any high schooler would do - debate internally if I can just slap some bandaids on these cuts and act like it never happened.

The expanding pool of blood on the basement floor convinces me that bandaids probably aren't going to solve this problem. Also, I'm good with blood, but there's enough blood on the floor now that I'm getting a little freaked out.

I head up the stairs to get my parents. I walk up a half flight to the basement and become aware of the blood trail I'm leaving behind. The door between the basement and the bottom level of my house is open, so I yell up to my dad, asking him to come here. He yells back "Can it wait? I'm watching the game!" and I yell "Noooo, I don't think it can wait". At this point, I'm breaking out into a bit of a sweat and feeling light-headed. My voice probably sounded funny, because he comes right away. Looks down the stairs, sees me in a pool of blood, staggers himself (my dad is not good with blood) and then opens the little powder room door (tiny bathroom) and throws one of my mom's fancy hand towels at me, then says "Immagogetyourmom" and runs off.

I manage to catch the hand towel, and I think that there is no way I'm putting mom's fancy hand towel on my bloody hand. She'll kill me. So I stand there with the the hand towel, feeling a bit nauseated, watching the blood drip off of my elbow onto the garage floor.

The next thing I remember is the pain when my mom gently put my fingers under some cool running water to get an idea of the damage. The water make the cuts part open a little bit, and I could see inside my fingers. Got light-headed again, the next thing I know, we're in the car going to the hospital.

At the hospital I got stitched up. The only hairy moment was when I asked the doc stitching my fingers if I'd be able to play the piano when I healed. He paused in his stitching, looks up and makes eye contact with me, and says "That depends,". As my heart is plummeting because I started piano when I was four, he continues with "Could you play the piano before you hurt your hand?". YES, you jackass, I could. He then tells me it'll be fine, I managed to only cut skin, all my tendons and ligaments are unharmed "I can show you some of them before I stitch this finger up, if you want". Um, no thanks, doc. Please just finish, so I can get home.

If anybody is wondering, the first thing I did when I got home was take the beer out of the vise. I told my parents I tripped with a beer in my hand, and that it broke when I fell. I know, I know, lamest excuse ever. I eventually told them the full truth, years later, and they had a good laugh. My dad said he'd wondered for years what happened, and assumed I'd done something dumb as hell not to tell them the truth.

Dad knows me well.

TLDR: High schooler in the basement cleaning and feeling lazy about going upstairs to open a beer to drink. Tried to use my dad's vise and a pair of pliers, slashed three fingers wide open and spent the night in the emergency room, waiting to get stitched up.