Albert Allen is a Compass realtor in Austin. His job is paid in handshakes, signed contracts, walking properties, and the small dexterity work most people take for granted, pulling lockboxes, marking up floor plans, framing a photograph for a listing. None of those tasks survive losing the use of a hand.
An afternoon in his garage with a table saw took the left hand offline for the better part of a year.
The recovery story is, in the broad strokes, the same one most weekend woodworkers face. The lesson is in the parts that come back, and the parts that do not.
A note on where this comes from, because the two halves of it are sourced differently. Albert told us what happened to his hand, and he agreed to this piece being written about it. Everything personal here is his account: the afternoon, the surgery, the months, the scar he still cannot feel. Everything clinical sits beside it from the published literature, cited at the foot of the page. Where the two disagree, his account is what happened to him, and the literature is what usually happens to everyone else.
The cut
Table saw injuries are, statistically, one of the most common ways an adult ends up in an emergency room with a hand wound. They share a profile: a slip in attention, a kickback or a hand-meets-blade sequence, a quick trip to the ER, and, for the more serious cases, a hand surgeon who meets the patient that night.
The first 48 hours of a major laceration are about damage control: cleaning, repair of any severed tendons or nerves, and immobilization. The first six weeks are about staying out of the way of the body's own repair process. The work, for the patient, has not really started yet.