Photo by Cynthia Larsen
On Joining a Splinter Group
Remember, major surgery begins at home
By Ed Goldman
Of the thousands of things you expect to outgrow with age, splinters are right up there with acne, warts, torn ACLs and an impatience as you await the next James Bond or Batman movie (one or the other used to come out near my birthday almost every year, or so it seemed, making it relatively easy for a loved one to decide where to take me to celebrate).
Yet as I write this, I’m glancing at a splinter in my right pinkie finger and wondering two things: How did I get it and what did I used to do to remove one?
An ether/O.R. situation?
Since I do very little carpentry or rose gardening these days owing to the lack of proper tools or ability for doing either, the question of how I picked up this splinter has puzzled me. Not as much as I’d like to learn I’d picked up an SOS signal from Jupiter on my smartphone or an exotic transvestite named Mordecai at a bus stop, but I was puzzled nevertheless.
My work tools these days consist of a computer so old its keyboard consists of hieroglyphics and a My Little Pony colored-pencil set I bought at a garage sale for 75 cents (which I’d first negotiated down to 50 cents from an asking price of 80 cents—but when the seven-year-old girl selling it began to weep and her father began to approach me with a nerfball bat he may have been in the process of selling in another part of the yard, I upped my offer, which calmed down both daughter and daddy. Especially when I spent another three bucks on a dollhouse missing half of its roof).
In any event, neither of my tools seemed to be a likely splinter suspect, so I decided to move on with my life. I’m told this is a healthy adjustment and indicates a growing maturity on my part; but in reality, we were late for dinner.
As for my next question, concerning treatment and remedy, I’ve removed so many splinters from the fingers and hands of children and adults that at one time, I was informally known as Doc Splinter. I had learned how to do it from my dad, who’d use rubbing alcohol to “sterilize” the area about to be invaded by the business end of a safety pin, likewise “sterilized” by his lighting a match and passing the little pin around in the mini-flame for a moment.
Before I go any further, must I add, “Don’t try this at home”?
Well, no I shouldn’t add that, since the only reason you’d perform an operation as crudely as this would be at home. It’s a time-honored method one might call Anesthesia On A Budget. If you ever saw the wonderful Willie Nelson western, “Barbarosa,” you may recall the tough-to-watch scene in which he cauterizes an open wound by sprinkling gunpowder on it and torching it with a lit match (which, as you can see, is our surgical utensil of choice). This isn’t as brutal as watching Robert DeNiro supervise a hasty operation to remove a bullet from his own belly in “Ronin”—after which he thanks the guys who helped him and says that if they don’t mind, “I’m gonna pass out now.” Homeopathic, holistic and homicidal methodologies have been with us since the first cave dwellers rubbed their sabertooth tiger bites with aloe, then called in sick for the rest of the week. Some of these have been scoffed at by medical science, largely on the basis of whether most major medical plans would reimburse the doctor for, say, introducing living leeches to cure your papercut. Some of them have stood the test of time, of course, such as drinking turmeric and milk for a cough, eating ginger and honey for indigestion or rinsing out your mouth with clove oil to placate a toothache. So when it comes down to removing this splinter, I’ll see if there are any safety pins, matches or rubbing alcohol in the house.
Oh, wait. It just fell out on its own. That’s another treatment option I neglected to mention. Next time. Until then, be sure to avoid colored-pencil sets.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
