JULY 11, 2021 – One of the downsides of nature is that it can get under your skin. I experienced this recently when a thorn spiked my finger—through leather gloves—as I cleared wild raspberry bushes from pine seedlings in my “tree garden.”
After an expletive the sharp pain subsided. Later, I made my way back to the cabin and various activities and distractions. I didn’t think about the stabbing incident until late in the evening, when my affected finger felt irritated.
I examined the source—a half-inch black thorn, which had pierced the epidermis at the cuticle. I went for tweezers and some hydrogen peroxide. Using my left thumb, I tried pushing the thorn out enough to snatch it with the tweezers, which, of course, required a third hand. My wife had turned in early, however, and I didn’t want to wake her up. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t remove the thorn from its scabbard—my skin—and I wasn’t about to conduct surgery on myself with . . . a needle. Instead, I soaked my finger in hydrogen peroxide, applied antiseptic ointment and used a band-aid to hide the thorn, at least until morning.
I read myself to sleep.
Early to bed and early to rise makes my wife healthy, wealthy, and wise. Me? I slept in. Upon waking, I removed the band-aid from my finger-with-thorn. Let’s just say that overnight, it had turned . . . UGLY. The thorn would have to be removed. My mind went to a scene in a Civil War movie, wherein a musket ball has to be removed from a badly wounded soldier. Lacking any kind of anesthetic, the field hospital surgeon gives the poor guy a swig of whisky and a stick to bite.
“Beth,” I called downstairs. “You’re going to have to remove a . . .” I almost said, “musket ball.”
Being wise, my wife knew exactly what to do. “Bring down the hydrogen peroxide and a needle,” she said.
“Needle?!” I said. “I think you can start with tweezers.”
“Okay,” she said, impatiently. “We’ll start with tweezers, but bring down the needle too.”
From the imaginary Civil War scene, my memory fast forwarded to the summer day when our younger son Byron had a sliver in the hand. He was about seven, and my wife had been working on the sliver for quite some time. She finally gave up on tweezers and went for the needle. With the bathroom window wide open so all the neighbors could hear, Byron screamed, “No, not the NEEDLE!” Worried that people would think our house was some kind of Medieval torture chamber, my wife couldn’t shut the window fast enough. To this day she laughs when she tells the story.
Like Merlin, I pushed on the thorn. Like Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone, my wife drew the spike from my finger.
“Darn,” she said. “I wanted to have to dig with the needle.”
She’d been running a Medieval torture chamber after all . . . and relishing it!
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
