A mixutre of Horror and PsychologyFollow

Interesting story actually. It happened literally the day we moved up to Santa Cruz to live with my father. I was playing in the backyard of my Grandpa's house. I fell and cut the side of my knee. It was a straight gouge, not a gash. Kinda triangular shaped. I thought I'd fallen on a rock or something. We put a bandaid on it and within an hour were piled in a car and headed off. I complained that it hurt, but it was a cut, and I was in 3rd grade, and on a long drive, so...

Turns out that it was a piece of glass that stuck straight into my knee joint. It healed over and left a bump. But when I twisted my knee a certain way, or rubbed up against it, it hurt. Kind of a sharp pain. Almost more like an electric shock actually. I'd complain, but my parents usually just dismissed it. I always thought that something was in my knee, but let's be honest, that's a pretty wild claim for a kid to make, right? And to be fair, I didn't complain often. Just every once in awhile. When you're a kid, you tend to only think about things when they're bothering you right now. And it's not like it slowed me down or anything. I played football, basketball, swam, hiked, rode my bike, and did all the usual stuff that kids do.



Glass doesn't interact with the human body much. It's actually quite common for shards of glass to go undetected for long periods of time. Apparently, I did a decent job slavering hydrogen peroxide on it when it first happened.



I showed the doctor the bump and told him that it hurt from time to time and told him I thought something was in there. He (she? Don't remember know) looked at it, decided it was a bruise and that whatever pain I was feeling would go away. Yes. I did explain that this had been going on for a year or two by that time. I suspect this was part of where my lack of strong respect for doctors came from btw.




It was literally an eighth of an inch of skin, at most. And if there are arteries running on the top side of your leg, I don't know about them. To give you an idea where it was (I'm looking at the scar right now), put your finger on your kneecap. Push it forward down your leg to the end of the cap. Now, move it around toward the outside of your leg about 60 degrees. Now move down your leg about one inch. It's right in that area between the cap and the top of your shin bone. It was sticking straight in. There are no arteries near there. It's just bone, nerve, and connecting tissue. It's pretty safe to just cut the surface area of the skin. And the glass did just kinda pop out once I had the top cleared sufficiently to allow it to come out. It had made its own little pocket in there, so not much danger of cutting anything. If there'd been something really dangerous to cut down there, it would have been cut years earlier.

And hey! I'm a do it yourself kind of guy! :)

Yeah. Probably more risk leaving it in. I'm pretty sure it was close to a nerve due to the electric shock like jolt I'd occasionally get from it. But after a few years and layers of scar tissue built up, not much risk getting it out. Fortunately, it was straight in and just popped out once I'd cut a sufficient hole in the top layer of skin. Left an interesting scar though. It's a round(ish) depression. Looks like a really big chicken pox scar really. It's faded and had to see now.



Hey. I've broken each of my arms once, and doctors set them each time. So that's something! :)

They also have the coolest stories. A friends uncle is a neurosurgeon. His daughter fell while they were camping and sliced open her temple. He stitched her up with her own hair then drove the several hours to the nearest hospital. Very cool!


On the whole though, I've found that unless you're spurting blood, or have a body part that needs re-attaching (which I suppose also involves spurting blood), there's very little reason to go to a doctor. I guess I'm just one of those people who believes in living life as it's dealt to me, and not medicating myself through it. I get that sometimes, it's necessary. Some medical conditions require it. But I also think that sometimes we over do it.

Doesn't glass not show up (well) on an xray? My understanding is that this is one of the reasons glass in wounds is really nasty. You can't see it, even when looking around during a surgery it can be easy to miss. I wasn't even thinking in terms of an xray though. If the doctor had taken 10 seconds to physically feel the part of the knee I was pointing out to him, he should have been able to tell that there was something in there. It was a hard bump, with something that noticeably shifted when you applied pressure around it.

I was sure enough something was in there to dig into my own flesh to get it out. And I'm no doctor. I would assume medical training includes something like pushing around a bump to see if there's something hard moving around inside?

Yes, palpation is one of the fundamentals of the physical exam. Again, there was no excuse for him/her not to at least take a minute to examine it. I'm sorry you got a lazy doctor.