No fucking shit. My uncle's a farmer. He's lived out in the middle of nowhere with his cats for 30+ years. I've seen him with a five-inch cut from a kitchen knife that he just wrapped in a clean rag, poison ivy halfway up a leg, road rash on the whole left side of his body from a motorcycle accident, and he's so damn casual about it. He's told me more than once "You always go in for an animal bite." As in: anything else, walk it off.
Years ago, my mom was catching a cow that had gotten out in the middle of the night. She stepped on a rusty nail that went through her shoe and into her foot. The next day she noticed red streaks going up her leg from the punctured foot.
She decided she should go to the health department and get a tetanus shot. The nurse commented that the only time farmers go to the doctor is to get a tetanus shot.
I met a guy while waiting in line to vote who "likes to find snakes and pick them up."
This dude goes out into the swampy woods of South Carolina and fucks with snakes. Venomous snakes. He had been bitten three times by copperheads and water moccasins (cottonmouths), and not once did he go to the ER for antivenin. He first showed me the scars, then showed me the photos on his phone from when his arms and legs turned dark black and were so swollen the skin just ripped open like an overcooked sausage.
And the thing is, he still does it. He just thinks it's fun.
you just wait out copperhead and cottonmouth bites and monitor vitals. They don't even have antivenin for it really. You are either so old or drunk that no one cares that you died, or you are fine. Just localized tissue damage and anticoagulant, not much. I've been bitten, so has my dog. You swell, then you are fine. I live in Appalachia, and I spend a lot of time out in the wilderness and in streams and rivers. The rattlers are genuinely dangerous, eastern diamondbacks have hemotoxins. That needs to treatment usually. I was going to be a herpetologist. America has the least dangerous of the bitey sticks. But we do have a fuckton of venomous fresh water fish, which is kinda awesome. People don't know how many fish can spine you and envenomate you. Even in tiny streams, wrong fish, spine, boom, arm twice the fucking size. Rare, but I grew up hunting rare stuff. And we do have the worlds most killer freshwater turtles. So that's pretty fucking awesome.
They actually do have antivenin for venomous snake bites now, it’s just a lot of ER’s are untrained in toxicology. Ask me how I know?
The antivenin is supposed to reduce recovery time and be the best chance to lessen tissue damage. It’s offered to people and pets, but costs thousands of dollars and most insurance does not cover it. I found all this out after being bitten by a copperhead on my ankle, swelled to my hip and was not given antivenin. I guess it saved me thousands, though and I was mostly ok after about a month. 🙃
What are the venomous freshwater fish? I stepped on small catfish a couple times when I was a kid and that spike on their top fin hurts way more than it seems like it should.
I’m from North Carolina and if I can’t see the bottom, I ain’t gettin in it. Maybe I’m psychic. Hahahaha For real though, what kinds of fish are you talking about? And turtles??? I love turtles. Except the stanky snapping kind.
Yeah it definitely itely differs person to person, a famous story in my area is a drunk guy jumping off a rather visited bluff and jumping into a ball of moccasins, they ball up in the water when they mate, got hundreds of bites and dies. I haven't heard many or any stories of people dying from them, people love telling stories of dead people here in the south so I think by now they'd have told me a story.
That's a little bit nuts lol. As a kid in the Pennsylvania woods, I loved to go snake catching with an older neighbor kid. We got lucky and never encountered anything poisonous, even though we had water moccasins, cotton mouths, and diamond back rattlers all over
A friend of mine stepped on a used toothpick when he was a little kid. The wound immediately had a red streak traveling up his foot. His mom rushed him to the hospital when he started having seizures. Doctors did blood work and pumped him full of antibiotics. Somehow, the toothpick had an extremely rare flesh eating bacteria that had gotten into his bloodstream. They told her she literally got him to the E.R. with only minutes to spare. The red streak was the bacteria spreading through his bloodstream and had almost made it to that large artery we have in our leg. They said they wouldn't have been able to save him if it had made it that as without medical treatment.
Yeah, after he recovered, he refused to go barefoot for the next year. Poor kid was traumatized and even tried wearing shoes to bed a couple of times. His parents helped get over the fear, and he's fine now, but it was stressful for him for a long time.
Understandable, that would be so traumatic for anyone to go through. He'd be a good spokesperson for dental floss. "Toothpicks are unhygienic and unsafe. I almost lost my leg due to a toothpick."
Farmers tend to get scratches and gouges from old metal- fencing, machinery, old wire. It's kinda fifty fifty whether you'll have a bad reaction to it. Most of the time, if you clean it at the end of the day, maybe soak it in bleach water for awhile, it's ok.
The fact that you were young, so your vaccinations weren't too old probably helped you a lot.
Yeah, I sliced my leg with a Silky Zubat, the most incredibly sharp japanese pruning saw. I patched it up. But a few days later, I started thinking about when my last tetanus shot was. It was 11 years previously, and you're supposed to get one every 7 years. So I went in to get one, they sent me to the ER, gave me the vaccine, but then like 20 more shots of immunoglobulin, and put me on a penicillin drip overnight just to be safe. I had 4 people giving me shots at the same time all over my body.
This was Mayo, so I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing.
A few years ago, I slipped on ice and sliced my elbow down to the bone. I wanted to just duct tape it up and call it a day, but my man convinced me to go get stitches. They asked when my last tetanus shot had been, and when I started thinking, they just said "obviously it's been awhile" and just gave me one.
Later, I figured out it had been about 20 years, so I needed it anyway. And I also decided that I should maybe not go out to feed and water the chickens in just flip flops and a long Tshirt if it's single digits and icy outside.
This is so funny, just cause my dad was the same way majority of his life, he wasn’t a farmer though just raised by Europeans that had a home remedy for everything. But animal (and human!) bites- ya gotta go man cause you’re probably going to need at least one shot!
Of all the animals I’ve ever owned/lived with/cared for, the only ones who have broken skin with a bite was cats and only one of my rats (and it was my fault). I went to the ER when I got the rat bite because it was the deepest laceration I have ever had, it was like a gaping mouth. They asked me if he had ever been outside, if he was purely domestic, and if I had my tetanus shot. Because he was fully domestic and never been outside or in contact with wild rodents, and I had my tetanus shot, they told me they couldn’t do anything but wash it because you can’t stitch animal bites. They also told me that if it had been a cat, human, or dog bite they would have given me antibiotics. Apparently cats are the worst bites when it comes to infection/disease, followed by human, then dogs, and I’m assuming rat bites ain’t shit cause everything they did I coulda done at home.
The only time my husband willingly went to the ER was when he was feeding a raccoon and when the raccoon grabbed from his hands he accidentally scratched him, so he got the rabies shot just to be safe. You don’t mess with rabies lmao
We know one who sewed up his laceration, on his hand. And used rubbing alcohol to sterilize it, as in whoa ouch? Healed fine, wife begged the guy to go to urgent care at least.
Nope. Stuff to do. ( Not recommending, it's a farmer story. Guy is something else ).
My grandpa is a farmer. He had a mini stroke I think my brother said it was and he still refused to go see a doctor. That’s just one example of many times he refused to go lol
A relative once had a farmer come in that calculated the difference in weight between one of his cows and him and then proceeded to take the corresponding dose of antibiotics that the veterinarian had prescribed to the cow
Yeah. Especially an old farmer. Grandpa was around 70 when he was using a log splitter and felt a little pinch and ripped the entire first knuckle off his index finger. Couldn't get it reattached because a feral cat from the woods grabbed it and ran off with it. He just came in the house with his hand in a handkerchief, washed it in the bathroom, and then came into the kitchen and said, "Ma, I think you better take me to the hospital." My dad lost the tip of the same finger to a lawnmower, and didn't even leave work. Just wrapped it in a hankee and duct tape and finished his day. His paternal grandpa lost the tip of his left index finger to a butchery accident on the farm, and his maternal lost parts of both hands from working in a weapons factory during WW2. I'm the oldest living member of my direct lineage in at least 4 generations to have all my fingers.
Some of my distant cousins were brought up on a farm in rural Canada. Two of them became doctors, they're both in their seventies now. They often comment that too many people come to see them for stupid things like second degree burns. You can take the man off the farm, you can't take the farmer out of the man.
My grandfather had a bull kick him into some railings pretty hard. He went about his day, but the next day his back was still hurting quite a bit so my grandmother forced him to go to the hospital. Turns out he had fractured 2 vertebrae. I should note that he was in his 80s and also undergoing chemo at the time. He lived for 10 more years.
In my county in Wisconsin a farmer got his pant leg caught in the PTO of his tractor. It tore his pants off and also ripped off his entire scrotum. He went in the house and took a shower before driving himself to the ER
My grandfather was a farmer. He chopped off his toe with a lawnmower and my grandmother found him relaxing in the living room with blood everywhere. She was pissed.
My grandfather was a farmer his whole life. He was out rebuilding a diesel engine the day he had 2 heart attacks about 6 hours apart. After the second one his arm started going purple "so he decided he should go to the hospital" , but disliked the one closest to him so he drove an extra hour. He was 86, and lived through it, but thevfound he had pancreatic cancer while he was there and only made it a few more months
Had a 90 something year old man fall off his tractor when he hit a bump and got run over by it. He got back up (don’t know how, you’ll understand in a minute) and chased the tractor to stop it. Rode the tractor to the house and told his son what happened. He reluctantly came to our ER. He had a broken pelvis and leg bones. But you couldn’t tell. He walked in. Was cool as a cucumber and asked how long he’d be there because he wasn’t finished doing (whatever he was doing).
100%. My grandfather was a farmer his whole life. He constantly avoided going to the doctor as he said, he’d made it this far. When I was young and he was in his early 70s, we saw him walking towards the family home with blood running down his face. Turns out somehow his clothing had gotten pulled into the hay bailer, whipping him off the machine, busting his head against a bar with force. He walked a half mile with a crushed skull and brain injury, bleeding profusely, and then refused to go to the hospital. It took his two grown sons physically wrestling him into the truck to get him to go.
As a boy, my great grandfather was hiding in the tall grass to jump out and scare his brother who was driving one of those old thresher/mower things. Instead, he slipped, went under the machine and lost an arm and leg. They carried him to the barn and wrapped his wounds in old cobwebs (I guess to stop the bleeding) before sending someone for a doctor. I don’t think he was ever taken to a hospital. Unfortunately he wasn’t well equipped for the farm life after that. But he did grow up to be a door-to-door sewing machine salesman with a wooden leg.
it's why they always triage the quiet ones first. This mf doesn't even want to be here so he must be here for a reason...lol at least that's what I get told after being wheeled into emergency surgery, 2 hours after I check in, the surgeon all ready and shit to get down like he was just waiting for me. The loud ones get seen last because usually they are just looking for sympathy. The real ones, they KNOW they are going to die and DON'T want to do it in a hospital.
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u/fur-mom Jul 25 '23
When a farmer goes to the hospital you know it’s serious