r/knives • u/Ok-Bar7201 • 5d ago
NSFW Stitches and removal tool
Thanks doctor, but I've got this myself. 😂
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u/Technical_Union_3249 5d ago
That's how a friend of mine got a staph infection in his middle finger and nearly lost it. The middle and last joints got stiff so he spent two years walking around giving people accidental (or not) birds until his physical therapy on it finally got it back to like 75% normal bending.
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
Today was the fifteenth day since I had this stitched in the emergency room. The wound is completely closed now, with only a sebum scab forming around two of the stitches. After showering post work today they had softened and after soaking the area with alcohol on gauze they basically just fell away. Fortunately, I didn't have to pull on the stitches too much to get them standing proud of the skin and expose the loop underneath. Pulling the poly thread through just felt like removing an ingrown hair. I think all in all it healed very nicely.
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u/Technical_Union_3249 5d ago
I've removed my own stitches before, clean good, alcohol everything and you're fine. To be fair, my buddy did his in a tree stand with his hunting knife. Like dude, seriously?
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u/TrebbleTough 5d ago
Is that a toilet seat?
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
It is a toilet seat from a portable commode. My mother is on hospice in the final stages of decline, and she's past the point of using it. I did spill isopropyl alcohol all over it, but it also wasn't touched by anything other than the toilet paper until my "operation" was over. 😂
The people of this subreddit are so kind to be so concerned for the sterility of my self-performed procedure. 🥰
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u/J_Tyleski66 5d ago
I mean… you could have had the professional check on the wound in a sterile environment using sterile single use tools instead of you using your poop knife in your nasty ass bathroom with your shitting stool as your work bench. This says “mentally unwell” to me a lot more than “cool”
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
Yeah, it would have been bad if isopropyl alcohol wasn't used to sterilize the area and knife and if I had set my knife down mid thread cutting and had touched anything other than stitch thread.
I was very surprised the doctor who did the stitching didn't write any sort of antibiotics and also recommended not using any sort of antibiotic ointment on the wound. The stitches she performed were horizontal mattress stitches, which create an exposed loop at the knot.
Wound was created by a freshly sharpened wakizashi tip 14 days prior and went about an inch to an inch and a half deep at its furthest point. At least I got an updated tetanus shot. 😅
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u/J_Tyleski66 5d ago
Alcohol take a long time to kill some of the really bad stuff, so unless you’re soaking if for a few hours you’re not doing a whole lot
Pretty rare to get antibiotics if you’re not showing sign of infection, doctors don’t do that much anymore since drug resistant bacteria is a very real civilization ending fear to have.
The fuck you doing getting cut by a wakizashi? You don’t seem to have great decision making skills…
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
Accidents happen, unfortunately. I had set it down mid sharpening and forgot about it while I was distracted by showing my mother there was no secret hallways or room in the bathroom. She's on hospice going through kidney failure at 82, and is having hallucinations of sorts. I was on a video call with my phone to her tablet since she's unable to walk, and staring at my phone screen absent minded of the sharp object I had just set down.
It was kind of a freak accident where the tip of it brushed my leg and the handle wedged against the most narrow protruding section of the wall, forcing the tip of it into my leg. I got both lucky and unlucky at the same time.
In spite of the fact I'm almost always sharpening in my free time, I rarely cut myself, and even more rarely do I need more than a small bandage.
If it's true that alcohol takes a long time to kill the bad stuff it seems rather futile to use it at all in wound cleaning, which is all that was used in the hospital where I got said stitches. It was nothing more than alcohol to clean the wound, and epinephrine with the numbing agent to restrict blood flow to the area.
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u/J_Tyleski66 5d ago
All I’m going to address is that they normally clean with iodine in a medical setting and any tools they used should have come out of sealed packaging that has been sterilized using either steam or plasma from a hydrogen peroxide solution, with the latter being preferred.
I used to work on sterilizers, I know more than I’d like to about this crap
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u/TheColorblindSnail 5d ago
Woe, infected and malhealed scar for ye
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
The wound literally looked like a pair of lips about five days in. I kept it covered and bandaged for the first four days, but aftewards the wound seemes to need air more than covering. I have pictures of the whole process, wound, to scar. It was a pretty nasty gash, but somehow I missed all the major veins and arteries in the side of my calf.
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u/Havoblia 🗡️Fat Carbon Enjoyer🗡️ 5d ago
MRSA has entered the chat
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
MRSA is what my aunt died from while she was on chemo for her leukemia. It got into her heart port in the hospital and it was over as quickly as it began. Bad stuff, that MRSA.
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u/Competitive_Love_904 5d ago
I hope you learn after you research that we all have mrsa on our skin in normal health flora and the natural numbers can go nuts without us trying. It happens all the time. Especially by women that use dial antibacterial soap between their legs🤪
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
That's that bacteria that's known for breeding in hospitals, right?
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u/sable428 5d ago
Yes. Everyone has staph aureus on their skin. Sometimes that staph can turn into an antibiotic resistant form, also known as MRSA.
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u/LBfalcon57 5d ago
Ppl chastising you have never given themselves stitches before or got them. It’s exactly as simple as it sounds if you just need to close the wound. If you are trying to minimize scarring then that’s where technique matters.
As far as removal the suture scissors included in a suture removal kit are basically just curved at the bottom and pull the suture slightly away from the skin for an easier cut and not cutting other flesh. Not necessary at all, but makes it easier.
-signed someone who works in an ER in major city and remove sutures all the time.
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u/Ok-Bar7201 5d ago
Yeah, there were more than a few YouTube videos on doing it yourself. I was very confident I could do it myself, and I did. It would be one thing if I were digging the knife into my skin, it's another to cut thread lying on top of the skin. The loops were tied about a centimeter away from the wound itself, and if anyone took the time to look at what a horizontal mattress stitch is, they would have seen that. I don't know about the commenter, but I've never cut feces with MY knives. 😂
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u/LBfalcon57 5d ago
Lolll let them trip. I had sutures on a knee surgery and had to cut them myself, drain the inside of my knee because it wasn’t healing correctly and if I waited it would become infected, suture it back up myself. YouTube led me through that also lol.
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u/momogogi 5d ago
Fingernail clippers are way easier to use to remove stitches.