I’ve had several people ask me how my hand was, so here’s the update.
Yesterday was stitch day! It had been 12 days since my “incident”, and so it was time to get my stitches removed. They told me at the ER to come back to the ER to get my stitches out. Yeah right. So I had weighed my options, and when I realized that 12 days would fall on a Thursday, I realized that I could just get Lydia to take them out for me!! She is a former nurse, and is in our Thursday night small group, and has been known to take other members of our group’s stitches out in the past. I asked her, she agreed, it was all settled.
THEN she had to go and have a baby on my stitch removal day! Thanks for leaving me hanging, Lydia!! But the fun part is that baby Radford will get to share a birthday with Chris.
I didn’t want to go to the doctor just to get stitches removed, and I CERTAINLY wasn’t going back to the ER, so I decided to see if I could take them out myself. After all, everything hurts less when you do it yourself, right? I remember when my Mom was teaching me how to pluck my eyebrows in High School. It was like murder when she did it, but when I did, it wasn’t bad at all!!
As far as my hand goes, most of the sensitivity of the cut was gone, and the only thing that concerned me was that it didn’t look like the top layer of my skin had sealed at all. I finally realized that it wasn’t going to, because it was dead skin, but the layer underneath was certainly sealed.
So I decided to give it a try. I found a pair of nail clipping scissors – the kind with really little blades. No luck – they were small enough, but not sharp enough (they are wire stitches, so it takes a good blade to cut through them). Then I tried my hair trimming scissors. Too big, but probably would have been sharp enough. Frustrated, I started to see if I could just untie them. I got a couple of knots in, but couldn’t get any farther. I wanted these dang stitches out!! Greg offered me his pocketknife, but I wasn’t sure whether he cleaned his toenails with it like my Dad does with his (Yes, all of this was during small group. We usually meet at Chuck and Lydia’s, but it was moved to our house at the last minute due to Radford’s arrival. Since Chuck is our current teacher, we had nothing planned, so we were just hanging out. The guys were playing Wii golf and the girls were visiting, and I was trying to un-knot my stitches).
Finally, Chris came up with the winning idea. Guitar string wire cutters! They’re small, they’re sharp, and they’re made to cut wire!! Perfect! He dug them out of his guitar case, and I was able to snip the stitches immediately! The pulling out of the stitches was the un-fun part. I don’t think the wire cutters made a very clean cut, because they had quite a catch to them and didn’t want to come through. But they finally came free, with a little bit of elbow grease, and I am STITCH FREEEEE!!!!So my injury is definitely on the mend. The bruising has almost all gone (one hand just looks slightly tanner than the other), the stitches are out, the pain is gone, I just have a thick scar tissue mound around the cut now.
Since I had quite a high demand to see the picture of the original cut that I spared y’all last time, and the only person that thanked me for not showing it was Gina (whom I like to torture anyway), Here are the before and after pictures:
July 5th:
July 18th:
Now it REALLY looks like a stigmata. :)
You just had to post the pictures…:|
Wow Rache…that looks a lot worse than I thought! Yikes! Glad you are ok.
Wow Rache…that looks a lot worse than I thought! Yikes! Glad you are ok.
Wow Rache…that looks a lot worse than I thought! Yikes! Glad you are ok.
Wow Rache…that looks a lot worse than I thought! Yikes! Glad you are ok.
i cant believe you took your stitches out yourself! shame on you!
you couldve at least called my mother….
;)
i cant believe you took your stitches out yourself! shame on you!
you couldve at least called my mother….
;)
i cant believe you took your stitches out yourself! shame on you!
you couldve at least called my mother….
;)
i cant believe you took your stitches out yourself! shame on you!
you couldve at least called my mother….
;)
I cut my hand last July too lol. It was The Coconut Fiasco of 2008. Long story short I was prying some coconut out of the shell with a very sharp knife and it slipped and I stabbed myself right in the middle of my palm. I totally freaked out! It hurt so bad and I was scared I had cut tendon, but everything was ok. No stitches. Just a flesh wound :)
Looks like yours was WAY worse than mine.
Cool.
i would have liked to see a photo of what it looked like before the stitches! guess you didn’t have your camera on you in the middle of the night while in the worst pain of your life…
Nope, no pics were taken. That was early in my blogging days before I realized the extreme importance of in-the-moment photography.