Splinter #4

Teach me how to write with flower stems instead of nooses.

2013: 149/365

I fully expected the police to knock down our door tonight. This week has been the week of splinters for E and, unlike splinter seasons past, he has become a HUGE drama llama about the whole ordeal. He turns into a big screamy, squirmy, teary mess at the mere sight of tweezers or whiff of alcohol.

So the splinter we found in his big toe Saturday seems determined to stay. No amount of soaking, poking, or prodding is removing it but keeping it clean, using ‘boo-boo cream’ (Neosporin), and forbiding bare feet outside means that at least it is not infected. The Hubs has some (visible) pencil lead embedded in his hand from circa 1984 and he’s just fine so I’m trying not to sweat it. It irks me but E says it doesn’t hurt so I’m convincing myself it’ll be fine.

But tonight we saw that E had a big sliver of wood caught in the fold of his right palm and that it was surrounded by a rim of white and a patch of red, warm skin. Uh-oh. Infection. The sad thing is that if we hadn’t have tried so flipping hard to pick out the toe splinter, this one would have been easy to remove.

Instead, it took some 30 minutes of begging, pleading, negotiating, and old-fashioned ‘holding him down’ to get it out. I’d like to think the tide first began to turn when we did the hydrogen peroxide ‘fizzy’ trick. We told him to look and listen as the peroxide’s bubbles attacked all the bad germs—we wanted him to understand how important it was to get the splinter out. And we could see the tip of the splinter poking out every time he flattened his hand out; the tip receded into his flesh every time he balled his hand back into a fist.

So Mama struck a deal. “Poke my boo-boo with your left hand as much as it hurts for Daddy to poke yours.” Yep, despite the pain of scar tightening and nerve repairing I’ve been feeling all day, I offered my neck scar as collateral. Big mistake. BIG. Huge.

Not only did he dig, claw, poke, and possibly move my trachea a few inches, I ended up having to immobilize 3 limbs and count slowly and loudly to 37 as he screamed at the top of his lungs and gave birth to a teeny tiny splinter (the Hubs went in with the tweezers and some nerves of steel). Mama did her job of applying boo-boo cream and a band-aid. Nilla wafers were then liberally applied to all involved. And, surprisingly, or maybe disturbingly, the cops have yet to arrive.

He still isn’t letting us near that toe. *sigh*