Splin-teriffic Fun

Let me preface this post by saying matter-of-factly that I am a wimp. I’m not tough, or strong, or stoic. I’m wimpy! I don’t like pain. I don’t have a high pain “tolerance” or “threshold”. That being said, I’ve had two c-sections and an appendectomy, so I have experienced real, unexaggerated, “this-just-hurts” pain.

I experienced some of that variety this past Saturday night. I had just put Sophie to bed, and I was coming down the stairs at our house and somehow instead of catching the doorknob (we have a door that closes off the 2nd floor of our house. Very useful with children.), I caught the door frame and somehow, in some flukey way, a splinter rammed itself under the fingernail of my left index finger.

I screamed bloody murder. It hurt so bad. I stood there paralyzed, trying to figure out what hurt so bad and what had happened to me, while Bobby stood on the other side of the door yelling, “What’s wrong, what happened?” I was still paralyzed by the pain so he whipped the door open and saw me standing there holding my hand like an idiot. He gingerly took my hand and examined the damage.

“Oh geez,” he said, “it got you good.”
“What’s wrong, what’s wrong what’s wrong, mama?” Joshua asked as he circled me curiously.

Part of the splinter was sticking out above my nail bed. Bobby quickly ascertained that we would need some tweezers, so he and Joshua headed to Walgreen’s. By this time it was about 9:30 p.m. so they had to hustle. They returned with tweezers and a very large Hershey bar for me. I’d been icing my finger as best I could to numb it up for the extraction, but it hurt too bad to put the ice on top of the nail. I braced myself as Bobby got ready to use the tweezers. Joshua watched with great interest and wonder as Bobby got started. Gingerly he grasped the end of the splinter between the tweezers. I took a deep breath. He pulled…and it broke off. The tip of the splinter broke off and the rest of it remained embedded under my nail. Undeterred, Bobby kept digging. It hurt so bad. I cried some more. Joshua paced nervously.

“I’m gonna have to go back to Walgreen’s and get sharper tweezers.” Sharper tweezers?? Why didn’t he come home with the sharpest pair in the first place? There was no time to argue. It was 9:50. My finger hurt like hell.

“GO!” I said.

I went to the freezer and got a big ice pack. I went back to the table and took off a big hunk of that Hershey bar.

Bobby came back. He had “sharper” tweezers, all right. They were basically tweezers with two needles on the ends. I gave him my left hand and held the ice pack between my teeth. It hurt so bad I knew I was going to need to bite down. He started digging. I started biting. My finger started bleeding.

And then….”Got it.”

Relief! I mean it still hurt, but the lessening of pain was immediate. And there was no huge splinter under my nail anymore!

“Thank you!” I sighed as I rested my forehead on the table. “I feel like I just birthed a third child.”

By this time it was 10:30. My husband-turned-surgeon, curious three-year-old and I were all exhausted. My finger still throbbed so I took three ibuprofen, a Tylenol PM, and an additional huge hunk of Hershey bar and fell into bed.

So here’s what I learned: Make sure to get the doorknob on the first try, make sure to get the sharpest pair of tweezers the store has available, and of course Hershey bars fix everything. Oh wait, I already knew that – but who knew my husband was so good with a pair of tweezers? With two kiddos, I gotta believe that skill is going to come in handy again one day.