We were down in Florida, Panama City Beach to be exact (it’s like Daytona, only not quite as nice.  If you’ve been to Daytona Beach as an adult, you get the joke).  We were sitting in our rented beach house (which was admittedly, awesome) watching some late evening TV when I felt something dig into my back.  I reached back to scratch it without even thinking and got a beach burr stuck to my finger.  I picked it out of my skin, walked over and tossed it into the garbage can.  No biggie.

When I sat down, I felt an itch in the same spot the burr was dug into my back.  I reached back to scratch it…. and got a barb stuck just underneath my fingernail.  Good Lord, did that suck!

I tried to dig it out with some tweezers but just couldn’t get at it.  Then my mother-in-law tried.  Unfortunately, she took a stab at it and pushed it deeper into my finger, deep enough I couldn’t see it anymore.  That was about 31 days ago.  Now, if you paid attention in school, you probably learned that the body is amazing at pushing foreign objects out, so I decided to let the body do its thing…. As of last week it still hadn’t worked its way out yet and my finger was starting to ache so bad that I was having a tough time operating my left shift levers on my bike.  My middle finger was infected.  Bad.

Interestingly, when I was a kid my little brother got something stuck beneath is toenail at camp and never told my mom about it.  It got so infected he almost lost his big toe.  Seriously.  I had a feeling I was going to be in trouble if I didn’t get to the doctor.  I also remembered that my brother was in the hospital for a week while they drained his toe.

What has two thumbs and doesn’t have a week to sit in a hospital?

This guy.

In a last-ditch effort before I went and saw a doctor, I snuck in a few minutes early at the office, sterilized a pocket knife and some nail clippers and went to town.  I won’t get too into the descriptions but there was puss, blood and pain.  In the end, I dug that little bastard out though.

This is a week later:

I’m finally pain-free after a month.  

Now for the disclaimer:  On this hand, what I did is exceptionally stupid according to the powers that be.  If I’d screwed up just a little bit, I could have lost my main salute finger or worse.  As well, if I’d let that infection go much further I could have really been in trouble.  I should have let the pros handle it.

On the other hand, I won’t have to come up with $10,000 for my deductible either, so that’s a win either way.

Humorously, on somebody else’s hand, I’m thinking back on my post the other day, about the wussification of men who can’t even change a car tire….  A pocket knife and fingernail clippers.