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Ridiculously dumb and trivial injury
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I wanted to try a 13.... I have no business on a 13 since I've done only 12-13 5.12's, but nonetheless I just wanted to see what it felt like. So 9 days ago I found myself at the bottom of Rapture, 13a, in Elevenmile Canyon, Colorado. My buddy went first. He's climbed 14a and a ton of 13s, so it made sense for him to suss the beta first. I was standing to one side when he took a short fall and I instinctively hopped up in the air to soften the catch. But suddenly I found myself swinging 15' through a bunch of bushes... it turns out they were THORNY bushes. I don't know the type. Brown with thousands of skinny sharp thorns and no foliage or flowers. My legs were ripped to shreds, but most disconcerting: I had a puncture into the pad of my right middle fingertip. Through the belay gloves as well. Of course I was grimacing in pain but had to prioritize my buddy who was hanging in space. Once he came down we surveyed the damage: the thorn had broken off leaving the tip under my skin. As silly as this sounds, we then had to bail to get tweezers and a needle from the dollar store in Woodland Park, then try to dig the thing out. No luck. So I climbed 2 more days with a thorn in my finger... tape helped. A week later, the family doc was not feeling confident enough to go after it with a scalpel, so she just gave me a tetanus shot. Then yesterday I climbed on it again (4th day of climbing) and this morning I woke up at 2am with a 100 deg fever and a massive red fingertip. So back to a different doc today who definitely said it had to come out. This was super painful, but worth it.  Of course now I have a bandage on my tip and an incision that won't heal for a few days, but hopefully the infection will subside and my fever will go down. How dumb and embarrassing. :( Lesson: no soft catches! :) |
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The tip of a syringe needle is great for splinters! Way better then sewing needles. It's the right shape to slide just under the skin, and the splinter. Yeah, insert jokes here. Sorry you got an infection, hope it heals well and fast! Best, Helen |
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Boy that brings back a memory. Was on a business trip to Malaysia and over the weekend went on a “jungle run” in the mountains around Penang. Slipped and fell and my hand came down on this wicked thorn bush thing that was kind of a cross between a cactus and a porcupine. Pulled about 40 thorns out of my hand but a bunch had broken off below the skin. By the time we finished the run, my hand was all swollen and blue so wound up in a Malaysian emergency room. They called in a hand surgeon who spent about 45 minutes digging them out and gave me a bunch of antibiotics and a warning that he may have missed some. Sure enough, about 3 months later a thorn emerged from the OTHER SIDE of my finger. Darn thing went all the way through my finger! |
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I’m sorry. I really hope they prescribed a course of oral antibiotics. The fact that you were running a fever is scary. |
phylp phylp wrote: Yup.. 5 days of oral antibiotics now. I already feel a ton better. :) |
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These puncture type injuries have a way of going from "silly and trivial" to "you might lose your limb" pretty fast. |
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On a side note....you felt like you had no business trying a 13 after 12-13 5.12'S. You should definitely be trying the occasional 13....find a light 5.13 project! |
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My eldest got a splinter that looked exactly like that last summer and he was very skeptical as I took him into the bathroom under the bright light with a sharp edged pair of forceps, but but gently slicing a bit at the point of entry to open it up I was then able to grasp and slide the whole thing out At least that lab training didn't go to waste and my hands are still pretty steady! |
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Could be worse.. you could shoot yourself in the head with a nailgun  |
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Glad you got it out, and hope it heals fast. Last summer I got the tiniest of tiny glass fibers stuck in my thumb. The tip broke off, so it was fully inside the skin. And since it was in my dominant hand, I couldn’t dig it out myself. A few days passed, it was still stuck. My husband gave it a go, but the splinter was tiny, so as soon as he started poking at it with a splinter-out, even the tiniest bit of blood obscured the view and made it impossible to see.
No-go. They apparently can’t remove a splinter that is fully under the skin. They can only remove something that they can grab with pincers, without having to cut the skin. They made an appointment for me with a hand surgeon! The closest available was 6 weeks away!!! So I was sent away with the standard bullshit instructions to “go to ER if things got worse”. The splinter eventually worked itself out. It was unpleasant to climb on it. |
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as a carpenter we get splinters a lot. I am siding a huge complex now with cedar shiplap. Literally get several splinters a day some of them bad. little tiny ones you don't notice usually turn to puss balls in a few days and are easy to get then. they usually come out with the puss when you lance it. the bigger ones you have to get immediately before they get lost and infected. I don't even own tweezers. I go straight to the razor knife and will not stop until the deed is done regardless of the pain level. its better to make a bigger cut and get that thing out of there than it is to leave a small piece in that will screw you in a couple of days. |
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John RB is that your xray??? !!!!!!!!!!! |
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Glad you got it taken care of. I’m still dealing with the after effects of a glass fragment that I had in my big toe (no memory of even stepping on glass) - it had worked its way down to the joint capsule. It’s been an 8 month saga with 2 surgeries, a ‘foreign body stress reaction’ which in my understanding is kind of like an overactive immune response, and post-surgical infection that took 3 rounds of antibiotics to finally clear. I actually did think I might be in danger of losing the toe at one point. These things can be crazy. |
Nick Goldsmith wrote: +1 - a fresh razor blade, magnifying glasses, headlamp and immediate intervention - dig until that thing is out. I have a pair of 10x magnifying glasses - key. |
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You use a fresh clean blade? ;) |
Lena chita wrote: Interesting. My hand surgeon appt was 3 weeks away, and the surgeon's assistant called me back and said I should just go to urgent care so I wouldn't have to wait. :) |
Nick Goldsmith wrote: Lol no... I just remember seeing that picture many years ago and thought it would put my "injury" into perspective. |
John RB wrote: Might be a state by state thing with regs. I believe they can do sharp removal in Colorado at urgent care. |
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My 3 yo son had a similar sliver in the bottom of his foot for about 2 months. It never got infected or made him sick, thankfully. Every time we tried to get it out he lost his mind. One day when I noticed it had backed out a hair I laid on top of him to immobilize him and was able to get it with a nail clipper (our tweezers are terrible). Him and I looked at it and admired it together. The skin on the bottom of his foot had a hole in it for about a week from where it started to grow around the sliver. |
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Yikes! Not lost on anyone how sarcastic the thread title is; these horror stories sound anything but trivial. Here's mine: Once at work I was in the back of a rickety cube truck. The wood floor must have been from the 80's. I reached down to scoop up a ratchet strap off the floor... a nasty splinter went straight under my finger nail. You could see the lumber underneath the entire length of the nail bed. It was absolute torture. Went to an urgent care, and even with a full digit block, I almost passed out when the doc was digging it out from under my nail. I have pictures, but I'll spare you. |
John RB wrote: I was very surprised myself, bc it seemed like a textbook urgent-care-type thing. We went to urgent care once upon a time when my son got a splinter under his nail, and they pulled it right out, so I thought mine would be the same.
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