I managed to spear myself in the arm with a piece of bamboo the other day.
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Nothing like an injury to get you thinking, 'geez, I'm injured.'
And such an inconvenience.
It was annoying because I had plans that day.
One of which was to establish mastery over the bamboo. Touche bamboo.
I'd been hacking away at the root system with a mattock, thinking any minute now the novelty was going to wear off. And sure enough.
I hadn't been paying much attention to the protruding branches, nor the imminent puncture threat posed.
But one lusty downswing later ...
Cue broken off bamboo sticking out of the soft meaty flesh of my forearm complete with an unnervingly large lump about 5cm up country from the entry point.
My first thought was 'hope that lump's not connected to the rest of the stick' but unfortunately, yep - quite the splinter.
Very Apocalypse Now.
And possibly one of those landmark injuries you might reel out at parties.
Up there with nearly ripping my ear off when I fell off my bike that time and hit my head on a traffic light.
Or breaking my elbow when I fell off my bike.
Mental note to self, that bike is dangerous.
Of course, no competition with the time I shattered my knee cap just walking along and slipping over.
Further note to self - forget bike, life itself can be dangerous, and randomly violent.
Such speculation required verification though.
So I called in my trusty gardening offsider, who went into first responder mode.
Bit of a retch and then soothing words along the lines of 'breathe, breathe, don't panic'.
I think she was talking to herself. Mainly about going to hospital.
But I didn't want to go to hospital because I had things to do.
Like take revenge on that bamboo which I thought I had been doing until it did this.
Touche bamboo.
Turns out this wasn't a landmark injury but rather a contender for self-harm episode of the year.
As indicated by fact I wasn't in pain.
Probably more shock.
Either way "Injury-no pain" was heaps better than "Injury plus pain plus go to hospital".
That's what seemed really painful at the time.
So we headed to the bathroom to make a mess.
The wound was swabbed and tweezers summoned.
While someone was out of the room digging round for disinfectant, I had a dig with the tweezers and excavated most of the stick.
Which set up the next conversation - should I still go to hospital because the wound might get infected.
My worry was the wound might get infected AT hospital, while I waited 10 hours to get triaged.
So like the dumb stoic man I was accused of being, I opted instead for the SES watch and see if I really need antibiotics approach.
I won't lie, things got pretty colourful on the arm through the week, but that's bruising for you - I hope.
Thankfully my enthusiasm for septicaemia was not infectious because that would have been really inconvenient.
