Saturday morning, a knife mishap that occurred while opening a new package of Swiss cheese left me minus a chunk of my left index finger and bleeding all over, well, everything.

I managed to get the hemorrhaging stanched — via a chunk of napkin and rubber band — and then bandaged the finger and headed to the court for my weekly pickup basketball game.

At which point it started bleeding badly again simply as I laced up my hightops.

I wrapped it up in a reinforced manner but never really did get the bleeding to cease, meaning a couple different guys who I was guarding ended up looking like crime scenes.

One of them, a Corvallis chiropractor named Frank Heresco, said to me, “Do you think you need stitches?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was bleeding so much I couldn’t really get a good enough look at it to tell. I just tried to get it stopped so I could come play basketball.”

A couple hours after our game, the bleeding finally did abate, so I guess I didn’t need stitches.

And while I’ve been sutured a number of times — I think I have about 50 suture holes on various parts of my body — I’ve actually never been stitched except for when I’ve been operated on. I’ve had some pretty good lacerations, but I’ve always gotten the bleeding to halt before deciding I needed medical attention. So far anyway.

And now our Catch of the Day, No. 24, a late 1940s Rawlings Playmaker model that I got at a Seaside junk store a dozen or so years ago for around $20. Note that it only has three fingers and a thumb, rather than four: