Bringing out the inner child

So, I need to put my arm in a sling.  I need several padded bandages and some multi-antibiotic too.  I really should have soaked my hand in Epsom salts and generally doused it with hydrogen peroxide, too.  Why?  WHY YOU ASK?  Well hell, I had a splinter!  It doesn't matter that the wedge of wood in my thumb was only a millimeter long--it HURT! And my wife, Maryann, spent a good chunk of time digging it out with a needle.  OWWW!!!

There's nothing like a splinter to bring out the inner child.
I'm generally pretty tough--I rarely wear gloves when I do the myriad of chores that face me daily, I split wood and cut down trees bare-handed.  My hands are the calloused hands of a workman.  I rarely will wear gloves when I'm working with fiberglass insulation.  A splinter in one of my fingers and especially near the joint will bring me down rather quickly.

Splinters are just plain yucky.  In my case, most often, they are pieces of wood from fencing or firewood.  Other folks get slivers of glass, fiberglass, thorns, bone, even the needles of a cactus.  It doesn't matter, they are all painful and all need to be removed.  Of course the ones I get manage to dig themselves into my skin deeply enough that minor surgery is almost always called for.

The technical definition of a splinter is "a foreign body under the skin." Well "duh".  And some of the online remedies-"Squeeze a little Elmer's Glue, wait for it to dry and peel it off, taking the splinter with it." Pah!  That might work for a wimpy little splinter with its end sticking out.  Knowing me, since I can't find Elmer's Glue here in the house, I'd use Gorilla Glue and rip off all the skin down to the bone!

I remember getting some splinters--they were tiny (TINY) needles from a prickly pear plant that a friend in Arizona was giving me cuttings from.  She warned me about the little needles and I told her I'd be careful.  Well...I tried.  I had those invisible cacti needles in my fingers.  And on the palm of my hand.  And on my forearm.  They were hardly noticeable--at first. My daughter was with me.  We packed the cactus cuttings into the camper and headed for Texas.  I tried pulling those needles out of my hand because they were moderately annoying. By the time we got to the interstate I discovered I was fighting a losing battle. AND THEN I PUT MY HAND DOWN TO MY THIGH!  OWW!!!!!!  On both legs there was a patch of sticky things sticking out.  A few got into the fleshy part of my hand but the rest--well, it felt like I hammered them into my leg!!!  That's about when I discovered that the tweezers we bought at the truck stop were useless.  I changed out of those jeans pretty quickly, putting on shorts, and saw two good sized, err prickly pear cladodes (that's what the flat plant part of the prickly pear is called) impressions--one on each leg.  Found another use for duct tape--yep, it pulled a lot of those needles out but a week later, there were all sorts of puffy "pimples" on my thighs and arms where the needles had worked their way in.
OWWW!!!.

Oh and worse, we forgot we put the cactus cuttings in the oven...they got cooked in the camper heat over the next month--my bad.  Maybe it's a good thing---can you imagine peeling THIS fruit?
That was probably the worse case of splinters I ever had (you mean splinters are a disease?).

I'm not really a weenie...and usually splinters don't bother me much.  I get them a lot.  As long as they are stuck in my right hand, I'm okay (left-hander here).  I take them out--or not.  But there are times.... The only thing worse for me is a toothache, but that's another blog.