I was heavy drinking whiskey with my friend and a couple girls at my apartment when I was 20. I told my friend to cut me with a steak knife - we were punk rock kids and I thought I was a badass, it was very stupid. So he’s giving me these light cuts that are barely bleeding on my upper arm. One of the girls says can I cut you? I said sure, and put the knife in her hand. She grabbed my wrist and went full bore at my forearm, cut me to the bone. It took some doing but I got the bleeding stopped, did a pretty bad one-handed job with a rag for a bandage.
Some other folks came over and one of them decided to fix me a better bandage. When he saw the wound he’s like you need to go to the hospital, but I was intent on partying. Being the good friend that he was, he came pounding on my door the next morning at 7AM and insisted that he was taking me to the hospital.
When I got there, they found out that I didn’t have health insurance and refused to treat me at all. They said it had been too long since it happened. It got severely infected and took about three months to heal and now I’ve got a wicked scar. American healthcare was and is a disaster.
I also have a stupid punk kid whiskey scar, also from arbitrary party knifeplay! For a moment I wondered if you were at the same one I was at. I woke up the next morning in a pile of what had been clean laundry, wearing stolen sunglasses and curled up with a handle of whiskey with a crazy straw in it, aaaaabsolutely needing stitches.
The scar always gets attention, if nothing else!
Kids, remember: The cornerstone of any healthcare system is YOU CARING ABOUT YOUR HEALTH. Don’t fuck around with your health.
If you do stupid shit for fun, make at least sure it kills you and doesn’t leave you with lifelong disability.
I need to see how cool the scar is before I can properly judge if it was stupid or cool.
Scar on the right unrelated
It’s over twenty years since that shit went down. You can see how my freckles got stretched.
Had you gone to the hospital when you first got stabbed, the hospital is legally required to fix you up. But instead you decided to party and went to the hospital too late, and now blame the healthcare system instead of yourself. You are the one that asked to be stabbed, then complain about healthcare later. Did you drink leaded gas as a kid ?
Where I live, they fix everyone. No matter how stupid they are. This should be the way.
I was in this exact situation two days ago.
Me too. I didn’t want to go in, but it was my sister who said “you’re injured. Sit the queue like a big boy.”
And so I did. And the first antibiotic and anti-protozoa mix left me vomiting aggressively. So I sat the queue again. The second mix, doxy+metro, is much gentler and I’m able to keep food down.
Only 4, then 6 hours in A+E. Drugs on extended health coverage, $0 ultimately. 🇨🇦
Did you survive?
Spent 24 hrs in emerg. Now at home confined to bed. Getting better thanks.
I remember my mom washing her immersion blender. She always left it plugged in and turned it on in the dish water, so the blades get clean. One day, she was trying to wash the cap at the same time and caught her index in the immersion blender. She turned down my advice to go to the ER, she rather had me tape the finger. It was of no use, gauze would just instantly get soaked and started dripping blood. But she still didn’t feel the need to go to the ER because “that will heal, I had worse”.
Spoiler alert, when she couldn’t sleep that night because of throbbing pain, she asked me to take her to the ER. They were pretty mad at her and asked her why she didn’t come instantly. 6 stitches and a load of antibiotics.
It took me three reads to realize it says “dish water” and not misspelled dish washer.
In her defence, I have no idea when I should go to the ER. I am pretty clumsy and do a lot of cooking, so am forever stabbing myself.
I often wonder to myself at what point I would need assistance.
If you apply what is close to a tourniquet and it still bleeds through, that’s a pretty strong indicator that you might want to get someone to look at it.
But I shouldn’t complain, I’m the same in that sense. I had a scratch wound from a fall (tripped drunk on the stairs when a friend was over) and constantly itched my leg and scratched off the scab. Got a nasty infection. At first it started to hurt in the evening, I went to bed and it was okay the morning. Then it wasn’t okay next morning, but manageable. I finally went to the ER when it got so bad that I had to lie on the couch the whole day and would almost black out from pain when getting up to go to the toilet. I’ve never gotten an official diagnosis, but from the pictures, I strongly lean towards strep infection. 3 weeks of penicillin and a stern lecture from the doc and I was right as rain, albeit the skin on my leg looks a bit different now lol
Oh I’ve never got close to needing a tourniquet, but it seems like there is a line somewhere in the middle that looks like it’s probably ok but should actually be seen by a professional.
If it bleeds longer than 10 minutes, if it hurts periodically or constantly or if something persists without getting better for more than 3 days, go to a doctor. If it’s really bad, go earlier (tooth pain for example can get debilitating quickly).
If you are at cancer risk (40+), get periodic check ups.
The best thing you can do for yourself and those around you is take a first aid course. They are usually cheap or free through your local community college or community education programs, you can get a certification, and it will teach you when you need to seek assistance, and when you can handle it yourself. It’ll also teach you what’s worth keeping in a first aid kit, like butterfly sutures, and what isn’t (those pre-made kits are junk).
Everyone should take a first aid course. It should be done every 5 years ideally, if only because you’ll hardly ever use it, and recommendations do change.
So, if you can find somewhere, give everyone you know the gift of lifesaving knowledge! (As in arrange for them all to take the course with you, you all get the info and a nice bonding exercise. Make all the jokes about when it’ll be needed on you because you are a klutz)
Who knows, you or one of your friends/family may save a life someday!
I’ve done multiple first aid courses over my life. I’ve learnt CPR, abdominal thrusts, and even did an outdoor first aid course where they taught us how to keep people alive when help was 24 hours away. I’ve been taught how to dress wounds, but the assumption for all of these was that someone is in imminent need of help. There was nothing (that I remember) about how deep of a cut requires a visit to the emergency room.
Though you raise a good point, the last course I did was 15 years ago, I should probably do a refresher.
I think for cuts there’s general rules for location, depth, and length to qualify as an emergency. Deep punctures/stab wounds should always be treated as emergencies, do not remove the object, but stabilize it so it doesn’t cause more damage. An amount of blood equivalent to a can of soda is life threatening.
I’ve stayed current on first aid certifications for about a decade and grew up with a parent in the medical field. I still suck at knowing when something requires an er visit, quite possibly because family, friends, and neighbors would come over and get stitches on our kitchen counter rather than go to the hospital. The best I can say is, if you are questioning whether something requires a hospital visit, then it probably does. Better to be safe than sorry.
Ah, the US. Can’t teach wound care, csnt afford stitches.
I’m not in the US, but I’m also not sure when in my life I should have been taught when to seek help.
I’m German. I’ve had 40 hours of first aid education total in my life, and I work in IT.
One course in school, one as part of driver’s education, one for my first job in food delivery, and one while volunteering at a youth center.If every visit to the ER wasn’t a potential bankruptcy waiting to happen, you would have been able to learn
Going to the ER is free for me in terms of money, but I have better ways to spend my time.
I read those kind of injuries with stick blenders are pretty common. I always unplug since I learned that.
I might pulse it in water a few times to clean mine, but there’s no way I am putting my fingers anywhere near the sharp end while the head is plugged into the motor, let alone while it’s plugged into the wall.
That’s also the life hack to getting treatment though, be it male or female. Always say your partner made you go in.
I found another hack.
Bleed from the nose for over an hour, then go into the ER with a mixing bowl full of your blood under your face. Scare the security guard and get instant admittence. It worked for me! I didn’t even get to the reception desk before I was admitted. Seriously.
That, or when a horse girl says she’s in pain. There is never any unfounded whinge from horse girl.
A horse rider I know once had to get an x-ray. They asked him when he broke his neck, since they couldn’t find any notes about it. He didn’t know he had broken it.
Best he can tell, it was from a fall a few years earlier. He spent 6 months grumbling about how slow it was to heal at his age. All the while, 1 wrong twist and his spinal cord could have been cut.
Can confirm. Sister ist a horse girl. She broke her toe once and tried to tough it out until she fainted from the pain.
Sister-in-law has 5 horses. One of them kicked her in the leg, probably cracked the bone. She kept working on the farm for the rest of the week. Couldnt even wear pants anymore because it was so swollen.
Grandpa wasn’t a horse girl but he did grow up on a farm. In Soviet Estonia.
Later on in life he had a more sedentary job, but that didn’t stop him from 1) simply making his own splinter using some random sticks when he broke his toe and 2) finding out he’d had at least one, possibly more heart attacks previously when he finally went to the doctor for a really bad case of pneumonia.
And those are just things that happened in the time I was a conscious human being, he wasn’t any less stubborn in his youth.
Did I mention healthcare is free here?
Farm people are built different.
Edit: oh, a bonus fact I completely forgot about, he broke that toe on the dancefloor, in his 60s.
