I went to the doctor today to get the stitches out from my hand surgery. After I got home I started looking really close and noticed that one stitch was still under the skin. I pinched the skin together like I was squeezing a zit and sure enough a little piece came through the opening where the needle went. I got my tweezers, grabbed the end and pulled a mile of fishing line (or whatever it was) out of my hand. I could feel it pull from deep inside and when it came all the way out it had a little piece of meat hooked to it.
It felt both creepy and good (in a strange, painful way) and it looked awesome.
Next time you cut yourself just do the manly thing, and use actual fishing line to sew it up yourself. You can boil it first if your too afraid of infection. You can get that same wierd feeling with each stich you pull out.
P.S. obviously I’m not a doctor, just a person who used to have no money for health insurance.
I know exactly what you mean…I hope it won’t be considered a hijack if I post my “yucky, yet strangely cool” story…
I used to work in the lab of a national chain of one-hour eyeglass places (1990). We each had a screwdriver we carried around with us. It had two ends: a larger flathead and a smaller flathead. It was pretty simple, just plastic, and the screwdriver pulled out of the handle relatively easily if you needed to change sizes.
When I put together glasses, I had to put a good little bit of pressure on the screw and be pretty precise…I mean, those things are tiny. So every time I put in a screw, I braced the frame against the middle joint of my left index finger.
One day I was having a particularly tough time with a pair of glasses, and I was really grinding to get the damned screw in, when my hand slipped and I drove the tip of the screwdriver into my finger. Now, I’d done this plenty of times before, but this time when I pulled the handle back, the screwdriver part stayed in my finger.
I had stabbed myself in the exact same place so many times that the nerve endings were totally gone. (I still have a scar there, as a matter of fact.) I looked at my finger interestedly for a second…this screwdriver tip, just hanging out of my finger. I called to my lab manager, “Hey Renee…check this out!” She looked at it and grinned and said, “Well, you’re officially a techie now.”
Apparently this happens to pretty much everyone who works in an eyeglass lab like that for more than a few months. It was cool in a REALLY weird way.
</hijack>
I hope it’s ok that I posted this, don’t want to steal your fire.
I gashed my index finger wide open while cleaning a very good kitchen knife (razor sharp!). Got 7 stitches. When it was healed, rather than pay another $25 for an office visit, I got out my little nose-hair scissors and my tweezers and removed them myself. It was gross and cool at the same time. I think it’s the sensation of having feeling in a part of your body that rarely, if ever, has anything to stimulate the nerves.
That reminds me of something yucky and cool all at the same time- when I had my back surgery, I had donated 5 pints of my own blood to use. They only used 4 during the procedure, and they gave me the rest pack via “reverse IV” (my term). It was cold and I could feel it running back into my arm. WAY weird.
Well, I have had stitches on 2 occasions, the first set was when I was 9 or 10, the second set was a year ago.
[slight hijack]I was using a razor blade as a scraper, it slipped and embedded itself in my hand, in that really meaty part just between my index finger and thumb. I bled like a stuck pig, but it didnt hurt. On the job injury, so I went to the hospital, the doctor poked at it, streched it, pulled at it, all without novacaine. Then he got out the sewing kit and novacaine, and told me to lie down, I didnt want to so I said no. He gave me a funny look, and started to sew it up, I watched the whole thing, it was quite interesting, and next time I wont even need to go to the doctor. [/slight hijack]
BTW, I took the stiches out myself, felt almost refreshing, like a cool breeze on my hand. Oh and they came out a week early because they were itching like mad, and driving me nucking futz.
Oooh, I know that feeling. I had a bad infection earlier this year and had to do IV antibiotics at home, so the health people installed a really thin tube into one of my veins that ran from my elbow up to my shoulder. I had to keep the IV solution cold, so I could feel a little chill right on the point of my shoulder as it came out of the end of the tube. Way weird indeed.
Not to spoil the funfest, but Diane, you may want to call your doctor and make sure they intended to remove all the stiches.
I’m led to understand that in some surgeries, they leave a self-dissolving subcutaneous stich or two. I’m worried that you may inadvertantly have removed something like this.
I’m no doc, and I’m probably wrong, but I’d hate for there to be complications if you didn’t check.
But at least you got the secret microchip that the doctor left on the end of the thread under your skin - will these aliens (or are they Government agents) stop at nothing?
After I finished giving blood for the first time, I asked the nurse if I could please hold the bag for a moment. It had occured to me that I had no idea what a plastic bag full of human blood might feel like, and I might not get another chance to find out.
From the look on the nurse’s face, you’d have thought I’d asked her to hang on to my shoe while I gnawed my own foot off, but she handed me the bag. It was really cool. It was much heavier than I expected, and it hadn’t occured to me that it would actually be warm. It took me a second to think “Duh, it’s your blood. It was just in your heart and your arm and of course it’s going to be warm.”
That thought was just yucky enough to weird me out. I damn near dropped the bag of blood. I still give blood, but I don’t fondle the finished product anymore.
