Just Wash You Hands! Gruesome Photos enclosed of my own poor choice.

Some of you may know I'm a Nurse Practitioner in real life and don't want to make a habit of blogging about medical advice, but I'm going to make an exception and share my own horror story.

It all started about 3 years ago when we were doing some home renovations. We refinished the entire basement, it was pretty nasty prior to that. All kinds of old insulation or rotting wood on the walls. Like really nasty. Anyways somewhere in the process I got a tiny scratch and thought nothing of it. Gave it a quick wipe on pants and went back to work....Bad Idea... You never know what's lurking where.

Here's the next stage of advice, when you finger starts looking like this, and it hurts to bend, stop ignoring it! Especially when the redness starts spreading into your knuckle. This is when my loving wife finally dragged my ass to the hospital to get checked out. That's when they promptly took X-rays to determine just how deep the infection went, and booked with a follow up with the plastic surgeon the very next morning for the potential amputation...seriously that's what the ER doc told me. Needless to say I didn't sleep much that night.

Now this is when it starts to get gruesome, please don't scroll further if your squeamish.

For real this is your last warning...

Well now it's your very last warning.

Anyways when I got there the surgeon quickly got out her scalpel, just to take a look.

So after she finished hacking it open and getting all the puss out, it turned out it was bad, but at least I got to keep my finger. She stuffed it tight with gauze and signed me up to get IV antibiotics for a couple weeks, and daily dressing changes.

Want to see that part too...

It's way worse then the other part...

Are you sure...

Okay, here it is.

This took a couple weeks of packing it everyday! Once they learned that my wife was also a nurse we got cut off from home care, they packed our fridge with IV antibiotics and dressing supplies and said good luck. I still think she kinda enjoyed her little opportunity to inflict so much pain on me. But she must have done a good job, since It healed up pretty nice over time.

Of course I have a few more photos of that process too.

I bet you want to see just how disfigured I am these day!

Well what do you know I just happened to take a photo 5 minutes ago as well.

It healed up pretty good. Lucky I'm an excellent healer since I'm also very accident prone.

The next year it was a broken toe, and just this year I sliced a good chuck of another finger tip off with a mandolin slicer. Of course I have a few more photos if anyone is interested. Gotta take those photos, it's the first step in first aid!

Anyways the moral of the story is wash every cut you get, regardless of just how small it may be!

Also I want to let everyone know about the awesome new #teamcanada tag and community there. We even have a discord channel, that has been very active. Big things are happening, be sure to join us. Here's my recent post about joining MSP and Discord. https://steemit.com/steemsilvergold/@phelimint/minnow-support-project-and-discord-chat-how-it-can-really-help-our-steemsilvergold-and-teamcanada-community

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