Won't be the last time

I did a really stupid thing today, I like to have amputated my finger. I was simply cleaning up after anatomy lab and grabbed the wrong end of my scalpel handle to clean it. I didn't know I had it "blade end up" but I did and I grabbed it and pulled with a paper towel in my hand to clean it off. Needless to say the blade went right through the paper towel, my glove and a significant portion of my finger. It hurt like the dickens and I bled like a stuck pig. And to make matters even more eventful for the afternoon ('cause cleaning up the blood had me pretty much occupied) my instructor insisted that I go to the campus health center to make sure I hadn't cut a tendon and to get stitches if necessary. And of course they were so worried about my blood loss (which really wasn't all that bad) the instructors wouldn't let me drive myself.

I really wanted to just head down to the food animal ward and let Dr. Pig take care of my gash--but I was forced to go to an actual HUMAN physician. Great. Actually, they were pretty nice. And they got me in and out relatively quickly (probably because I was bleeding all over their waiting room). The doctor did think I needed stitches, but I declined. It'll heel fine, I'll take it like a woman.

My classmates were great about it, and luckily found it as funny as I did, well after the blood was cleaned up and the pain subsided. The best part of the whole incident was when the nurse at the school health center insisted that I could potentially have been infected with rabies from a dog cadaver that has been soaking in formalin for the last 6 months. I kept trying to explain to her that really wasn't a possibility, and either way I had been vaccinated. But it didn't really sink in until the actual doctor told her that I was lucky, formalin kills damn near everything so it was actually a pretty clean cut. Excellent. The whole event ended well, no stitches and I'm still rabies free! While this is the first time I have tried to amputate my own digits, I can see from here that this probably won't be the last stupid accident I have during vet school. Here's to holding the scalpel by the blunt end!