Last Saturday, we assigned our boy scout troop the task of building cooking fires and cooking a simple meal (err… ok, warming up a can of beans ). A nice challenge in a damp forest, and always a good opportunity to bring them up-to-date with safety practices: after all, they’re playing with axes, knifes, fire and hot food…

So when I almost chopped my finger off with my brand new knife, more than my finger hurt - it was extremely embarrassing to be transported off the grounds to the nearest first aid post to get my skin sewn back together. I did get a compliment from the medic for neatly cutting just between the digit’s tensor tendon and some nerves and veins, though .

I fear my colleague scout leaders will have prepared some special safety practice for me next time…

(in the meantime, the bandage and single suture have been nicely glued together with old blood, so it’s going to be a lot of fun to remove all that stuff, including the suture, with just one hand. That and the pleasure of receiving the suture without a local anasthetic will teach me to be more careful with sharp knifes in the future, I think).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Kitchensink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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