**** a brick helles, is it tetanus?
4 pm yesterday I was in the last stage of sanding the cut underneath the rim of a keg. I'd been round a few times with a flapper disc underneath, had a quick light feel around inside the keg, then attacked it with a piece of fine wet & dry paper. l felt a quick sharp prick in the tip of my right index finger from a sliver of ss that went straight through my glove. I went to pull it out but it wouldn't budge. I carefully peeled back the glove to find the thing had gone through the pad about 2mm deep & out the side 10mm later. Bugger me, these things are really brittle. I cut it with snips to get the glove off & on further inspection discovered I had about 6mm at the pointy end & 15mm at the other. To push through or pull back that is the question? A fishing hook is a push through cut off the barb moment, this was a f*&k me it resists both directions. Pulling back something was catching & pushing forward the sliver tapered bigger & probably had barbs as well. After fiddling with it for 10min about 5mm broke off, so that was it off to the bloody doctors on xmas eve. All shut, so off to the Emergency Department at the hospital, they'll have the tools & know how for the job.
A nice doc inspected the situation while had a discussion about barbs, brittleness of heated ss, pushing & pulling, being able to play the piano etc. He told me it was one of those tricky situations that might not work too well. He then tried to cut the tail off with a pair of scissors which I knew wasn't going to work, I thought they'd have super duper little snips & such, but apparently not. After admitting defeat with the scissors he proposed a third option called the pull through which we decided to go with. I bravely declined a local so he set to work with the task at hand. Ah that's better I said even though I was bleeding like a stuck pig, but I spoke too soon because on further inspection he said there were still very small pieces at both ends & through the middle still there. After 10mins without success he admitted defeat & said he could cut them out but I'd be best avoiding that option, I agreed. He then dressed my finger with a super duper treatment & condom finger bandage. It was a very suggestive erotic thing to see being applied & if it had been a sexy nurse doing it I would have cracked a fat for sure.
I'm not to worried about infection myself having recently had a tetanus shot, the ss involved had also been nicely pickled in good quality beer :lol:
Best wishes for a full recovery helles :icon_cheers: