On PURPOSE?

M

Merek

Joined
Sep 24, 2004
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I was relating an old story the other day in answer to a question about the scars on my left index finger and hand. The basic answer is that I had a short stick and a long rattler and this one finally got me. Just a pinprick at the back of my nail.
One of the options I considered at the time was to remove a hefty portion of my finger to head off the poison and actually had reached the point where my Buck 110 was open. :barf: Something about the idea of forcing the blade through my knuckle joint made me think further on the problem and I opted instead to tie it off and go for help. All-in-all a non-recommended experience despite the instant celebrity status I achieved. Things got swollen and ugly. I didn't die. Finger is quite useable despite its raggedy appearence. This happened in 1978.

This brought the question to mind, 'How many of y'all have cut yourself (or someone else) on PURPOSE. Not including acts of self-defense or sheer stupidity....
 
I'll try to cut super thin layers off the tip of my thumb to test if I've gotten the blade sufficiently scary-sharp. By super thin, I mean so thin that they are transparent, just the dead skin on the very surface. That's my crazy self-mutilation tale. :eek:
 
When I was maybe about 12 years old I delivered newspapers. After delivering a paper on the second floor of an old building, I was walking down the stairs holding the wooden railing. Some BIG splinters drove themselves into my hand. When I got home I removed what I could with tweezers but some were embedded pretty far into my hand at an angle.

I let it go a few days and the wounds started closing and the skin started to heal over the splinters. It still hurt and I realized it could get infected. I took some kind of utility or X-ACTO knife, cleaned it with alcohol and cut my hand. It was just large enough so that I could grab the splinters with tweezers. It didn't bother me because I was quite glad to finally remove them.
 
I had a small fish hook through the skin on my first finger and I cut the skin to get the hook out. Not deep or long, no scar. I will also cut the skin to remove wood splinters.
 
I used to surf a lot in PR, mostly on reef breaks. Stepping over sea urchins sometimes was inevitable. You can get a lot of spines in your feet which are tedious (painful) to remove sometimes. A needle, tweezers and sharp knife are all needed to remove them.

Usually deep ones won't come out with the tweezer b/c if you pull hard they break inside the skin so a linear cut on the skin will allow the tweezer to get deeper which helps.

Also, I once removed a wart with my SAK from the base and it never grew back.
 
As written above, I’ve cut my finger open to gain access to splinters that weren’t going to come out otherwise.
 
splinters both in my own hands and feet, as well as other ppl's fingers(why they trusted me, I'll never know :D).

Find the nice fine tip of a spydie cricket does wonders for only getting the top layers of skin.
 
Merek said:
Not including acts of self-defense or sheer stupidity....
Click to expand...

Sure you don't mean self mutilation there?

I've got plenty of intentional scars... a lot of them have faded over the years, but some of the bad ones are still very visible. People have asked me about them and it's a touchy subject to discuss... not so much because I don't want to think of the past, but because I don't know how people will react to it.

It's hard to say "well, I cut myself just to see the blood pour out."

A few of them were suicide attempts.

But today I look at my arms and see little badges of courage or at least survival. I can say that I've been through a lot, seen a lot and done a lot, tried to get away from it, but in the end realized that it was probably worth living just to see more.
 
When I was much younger, I smashed a bottle of pepsi I found with a stick while fishing. I didn't realize that the bottle was still under pressure, and the glass flew everywhere. I didn't think much of it, but a month later the cut on my index finger was healed but very red still. I had the feeling that something was in ther, so I cut the wound open again and lo and behold, I pulled a long sliver of glass out of my finger.

Glenn
 
I do the skin cutting test to determine sharpness as mentioned here before. I have been know to remove bits of glass, splinters or whatever from my hands or feet with a knife of some sort.
The most off beat thing I did was when I was about 7 years old. I had read a book about blood and thought it cool to know about differing shades people may have and differing clotting times. I wanted to see my own blood. One night, I took a razor blade and sliced a nice, deep gash to my pointer finger. The bad part was that I appplied a lot of pressure for the cut. It took quite a while for the blood to stop and days for the wound to heal.
 
I would bleed myself if something poisonous bit me on the fingers. Probably woudn't help all that much but cut it and then apply pressure to the joint to keep the poison from flowing up to your heart.

I have cut myself to remove splinters before with an Xacto knife.
 
I've cut myself many times with a SAK (usually with my small blade, which is a reserve and always very sharp and is also better for fine work) so that I could expose splinters enough for tweezers to get at. The worst time was four years ago. I was in class and reached in my desk for a pencil and found a newly sharpened #2...actually, the tip of my finger found it. The graphite point broke off in my right-hand ring finger. It was the end of the day, and when I got home I used my Explorer's small blade, magnifying glass, and tweezers to get at the fragment. It was lodged at an angle so that I could not use the entry wound as an exit wound, and had to make a cut that was pretty deep and pretty long and the fingertip location made it that much more painful. Luckily it worked and I didn't get an infection. If you plan to make cuts that aren't just slicing through one layer of skin, be careful that A) your blade is sanitized (I just ran it quickly over a bic lighter) and B) you're not going to go slicing up any big veins/arteries.

But all in all, trying to work up the nerve to cut yourself is pretty hard :eek:
 
Just last week I used my Kershaw Avalanche to lance a very painful puss filled infection at the nail on my ring finger. It was gross but felt much better the next day. I drenched it with hydrogen peroxide and globbed on some Neosporin after the self-surgery.
 
Yup - used my Delica over the last few weeks to remove some imbedded slivers. Point works great to slice away a bit of skin so you can get your tweezers in there. Occasionally, you get that tiny bit of skin that doesn't quite heal over - it will get cut away with either my Delica, or SAK. Peroxide, of course :)

- gord
 
I've worn boots almost every day for the last...almost 4 years i think. The skin on my feet is like leather now. Every once in a while i get bits of skin that i need to shave off the bottom of my foot.

Gross eh? :p
 
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