Definition: In this task, you are given a Reddit post as a text. Your task is to generate a title for this text. The title should start with "TIFU by", followed by a situation that caused humor. The title should contain 7-12 words, ideally.
Input: Text: **edit - thanks for all the very kind comments (and not a single "what an idiot" so far, anyway). and the gold, that's a new one on me!**

this may get moderately lengthy, but i told the story the other night and wanted to really remember it all.

man, did i fuck up. so, me at 33 or so, married with a 2 or 3 year old daughter. marriage was kind of a bad decision, mrs. at the time had some “issues” that were really coming home to roost. daughter was really awesome.

i’d been a musician forever - first piano lesson at 6 years, guitar at ten or so, first live gig (guitar) at 12, in my 20’s played in a bar band, 5 nights a week in a big city, made very decent money to basically party every night. met my wife at a gig in fact.

but i’d also gotten way into piano, sort of returned to it after a lot of years. when all my friends financed their first decent car, i financed a baby grand. got married, went into actual-job-life, had the first child of three and so on. 

my wife became a real shopaholic and could outspend my hardest efforts. i had issues of my own (raised by elderly and abusive parents, my mother could become a vicious and violent cloud of fists in a heartbeat and dad was mentally ill and eventually alzheimers added to the fun - and we were always broke) so i certainly had some major self esteem issues that were poorly addressed by marrying the hottest chick in the room. 

i had learned to make furniture and had a decent workshop in my garage. i was doing sort of repro antique bookcases and hutches when the “french pine” craze was going on, for extra cash. one night i had a nightmare that i was cutting wood on the table saw and looked down to see i’d cut my hand off. i woke up screaming and it stayed with me - i was always protective of my hands, but started wearing work gloves more and slowing down a bit. i’d been recording music to a 4-track cassette, kind of spacey rock with guitars and pianos, and i wanted to save some cash to either book some studio time or get a better piano. sounds cliche, but some part of me was sort of screaming to do something with music - it had been my whole life and had really faded into the background.

on the night of the 1994 northridge earthquake, we were living in texas, and my younger brother lived near the california quake epicenter. it was a bizarre night in our town, the wind was insane, stuff blowing everywhere, it got dark early but no rain came. phone lines in california were down and we were trying to get him, my wife was watching the fires on the news. i went out to the shop to work for an hour and everything felt kind of surreal.

i was using a flat-bed planer - image something like a small tin can lying on its side with tungsten blades running down it’s length, spinning at like a zillion rpm. that protrudes from a slot in a metal bed, and you push wood over it using plastic holders to smooth or thin the wood down. i had put on some gloves and was working wood across it when - bang, it felt like someone had hit my hand with a hammer and there was my glove, off my hand, wrapped around the drum. apparently a small tear or tater had gotten pulled in, and dragged my whole hand down.

you know when you’re doing the dishes and under the suds you hit a knife or a broken glass, and you grab your hand and look, expecting a bloody mess but you’re fine? i looked at my hand and saw one of my fingers was lopped off - perfect cross-section of flesh, bone, and marrow. i screamed - i screamed really loud.

i came to understand something huge that moment - your reasoning mind is like a little man, standing on a solid floor, and that solid floor is your sanity. in that instant, the floor rocked - it pitched and that little man staggered and almost hit the deck. 

i looked at my hand again, and suddenly i had tunnel vision - my visual field was dark, with a fuzzy circle in the center, with that destroyed finger right in the middle. i screamed again.

i was at the edge of panic, and realized i was pretty much on my own - my wife would have collapsed if she’d seen my hand, and i managed to get my shit together a bit. i had to get her to drive me to the hospital, but i also thought i should see if there was anything to retrieve. the planer was bolted to a workbench, but i first decide to pull the glove out of it. i grabbed it and tugged, totally forgetting the tool was still running - the motor groaning away while the glove locked up the works. i got the glove an inch or two out, which freed things up enough for the tool to race up to speed and suck the glove back in. stupid. i just missed having more of me sucked into the damn thing. i shut it off, and looked for a tool to get the thing off the bench. there was a huge gout of blood sprayed across everything, soaked into the bench and smeared on the tools, but my hand had stopped bleeding.

(and anyone who wants to let loose with the “you’re a fucking idiot!!” comments, feel free - you can’t express anything worse than how i felt about myself. any hardcore industrial workers thinking “i chopped off four fingers and was back on the job by lunchtime”, i salute your strength.)

but anyway, i realized the nature of that tool meant there was likely something more like bologna slices in there, getting the thing off the bench and opened up was more than i could do, standing there all wobbly with tunnel vision and one hand throbbing like it had been slammed in a car door. i decided it was time to go. i wrapped a glove around my hand and ran inside.

inside, my wife was watching helicopter footage of a neighborhood on fire but had reached my brother who was fine. she ran the baby across the street and we headed out - she started towards the little commercial clinic, thinking “stitches” - i told her to go to the hospital. the roads were pretty deserted (the crazy weather was still raging) and i ran into the er while she parked - i needed a minute without her.

ran up to the desk, showed the girl my hand and blurted out “i think i cut my finger off - and i’m a piano player!!” they had me come around the desk and started asking questions - i couldn’t write out any forms. a nurse came in and gave us a funny look while i was getting the “what time did you eat last” and so on. the new nurse said, “can’t you see he’s in shock? he’s white as a ghost!” i thought this over and said “i would really like to sit down”. they plopped me on a bed and rolled me into a treatment room. a resident came in, took a look, and said “we can just cut it down another inch to close it - might have some tendons snapped, too”. i told him i needed to save every possible millimeter and asked for a hand surgeon, and it was off to x-ray. i remember a nurse fussing over me muttering, “damn power tolls - they should all be illegal”. 

then back to the treatment room, where they told me the hand specialist was 45 minutes out. “ummm… great. but this thing is hurting more every minute and i’m really considering puking, or screaming - can you give me a shot?”

“no, you’ve eaten so the surgeon has to choose your anesthetic. but let’s go ahead and clean it.”

i was amazed - “clean it? what are you gonna do for, i dunno, pain management?”

“oh, these two guys are going to hold you down”.

standing there were the two biggest orderlies they could scare up - big mexican dudes in scrubs. they very gently pinned my upper arms down to the table. they were nice guys - “sorry, maing. i know this sucks”. and thus began the scrubbing and picking and probing - apparently splinters and sawdust were well-ground into me.

y’know when former pows talk about sort of leaving your body during torture? i don’t want to compare this to being tortured willfully for weeks, and i was being treated with great kindness, but i most definitely reached a point where i was more “observing” the pain - like “my word, this is certainly an absurd amount of pain - can’t say i’ve felt this before!” like, it still hurt insanely, but it had gone beyond any sort of capacity to process it. at one point i heard a female voice say, “there, in the marrow” and watched the room really shimmer.

then, boom - done. that group left and a tech walked in with an x-ray. “yep, you amputated the last joint and into the second…” at which point even more hell broke loose.

“amputate? ammmputaaaaate??” there was my wife, who i suppose they’d kept waiting during the cleaning. “you’ll never play piano again!!!! you’ll never play guitar again!!!!” not, like, sobbing or sad - but angry. amazingly, furiously pissed off. someone pulled her out of there, and then i was alone. 

lying there under buzzing fluorescent lights, i was suddenly floored by the most massive sense of guilt i’d ever known. since i was six, i’d spent hours staring at my hands. playing piano for hour after hour, and i used to play guitar until i nodded off but my body would keep playing (i used to record that - i’d come up with some cool stuff). my education was all art - i got a great scholarship to college for commercial illustration, and at this particular moment i was an art director for a national retailer. everything good in my life had come from my hands, and i’d blithely fucked one of them up. i’ve had some shit moments in my life (see: my parents) but nothing as completely crushing as this.

but then… something kind of glorious. my neighbor had something going on and had to drop my daughter at the hospital and hand her over to my wife. my daughter was born perfectly healthy, but by six months’ age, a massive port wine stain had faded into existence. her entire left leg, left foot, and up her left side looked like a mess of purple-black splotches, with only tiny specks of flesh color. she’d already been shunned at playgrounds and teased. she was about to enter her era of “never wearing shorts, even in the texas 106° summers”. and the discoloration is caused by an excess of capillaries, so the extra blood was making that leg grow faster. every morning, every diaper change, every night, we’d wrestle her into a complex compression stocking. 

but my wife (now ex-wife) had settled down, the baby wanted me (i was a super hands-on dad - even changed the very first diaper of all three of my kids. the one gift of shitty parents? it can make you a hell of a great parent, or at least make you try). i heard someone start messing with equipment, heard something get knocked over, heard my wife say “don’t climb on that!!!” and then “dadddeeeeee!!!” someone hoisted her up onto my chest.

i guess that’s the gift of fatherhood - your own shit takes a back seat. there was my girl, hugging my neck, giving me a drooley kiss, laughing. all the treatments she’d had, all those waiting rooms - i’d seen unbelievable, horrific shit. kids burned half to death, kids bald and decimated from chemo, i looked up once to see a beautiful child in a coma with his hands atrophied into curled claws, and watched his father take a comb and gently straighten his son’s hair.

and it was like “there’s my girl, she’s got a funky leg but she’s happy and she’s not in a coma”, followed by something like “take my whole arm off as long as she’s ok”. i just felt a mountain of weight slide off of me that moment, and to this day i’m thankful every day for my children. every father’s day, i get handwritten notes that i can’t finish because of my tears. wonderful kids. they say i did good.

then the hand doc came in, pointed out there was a tiny flap of skin that seemed to have blood supply - they could fold it over and not whittle me down any further. i had one tendon to re-attach but it hadn’t shot deep down into my palm, it was hanging by a thread (had it come loose, they'd have to slice down my palm to find the end and draw it back up).

they pulled out the biggest needle i’d ever seen and plunged it into my armpit - one last “fuck you” from fate, one last insane bit of pain, one last “yeah, i deserved that” and then everything went numb from my shoulder down. i spent the night in the hospital.

a good friend had come by the next morning and cleaned up my shop, took the planer apart and cleaned it out. my wife said he came inside looking really pale and asked where the scotch was. i came home that afternoon, my forearm wrapped in a giant cast which i was instructed to rest on top of my head.

back to the idea of sanity for a moment - that little man standing on a rocking floor. my psyche took a definite hit. for weeks i would focus on “cut off” things - a baguette with the tip sliced off, a hanging ivy plant with healed nubs where vines had broken loose. i would fixate on things like spinning fan belts when jumping a battery, the garbage disposal, a simple desk fan. i’d look at people’s hands and think “how do so many people have all their fingers?” 

a couple days after, my wife was still being distant and angry. finally she blew up at me -  i was sort of struggling to snap my mind out of fixating on stuff when she started screaming, “i hate you for putting me through that! i hate you for scaring me that bad!” i ran out to my shop, sat down amidst all the half-finished furniture, and had a good old cry.

weeks later, i was back to normal, had learned the joys of the kensington track ball (one finger control, and nobody else wants to use your computer), and found i could play piano (though my now much-shorter finger could get stuck between the black keys). guitar was no issue, though fingerpicking took a definite hit. i decided it was time to get back to completing those furniture projects. i went into the shop, took a deep breath, noticed that my forehead was coated in cold sweat, and flipped the planer on. it roared into life and a cloud of brown dust floated out, remains of my glove. something flipped into the air and landed on the steel bed of the tool - a dried and browned crust of my own skin. i swept it into the trash and decided that was enough for one day.

TIFU by chopping one of my piano-playin' fingers off