When teaching your young Cub Scout how to whittle, do not use your trusty razor sharp combat knife which served you faithfully in deployments all over the known Planet Earth to demonstrate proper whittling technique. Especially do not do this in shorts, outside, on the porch, sitting in your favorite chair with your legs crossed, lest you demonstrate to your CubScout that it is possible to slice into your flesh so thinly that it rolls up like a wood shaving from a planar and teach him a whole new vocabulary along the way.....lots and lots of bleeding but no sutures required....
Youch! That's nasty!
I have done something similar with my finger before with a microtome: quite a short roll of skin though; not much blood mind you! (lots of serous* exudate, but very, very little blood) - for all those would-be knife-users, remember to twist your torso round so that your legs are BOTH at one side of where you are working - that way you're not going to accidentally slice into your femoral artery with your knife when you slip!
Had the pleasure of witnessing a Wilderness Survival instructor do that a few years back: one of two arterial bleeds I've had the pleasure of witnessing first-hand! (I'm a scientist, if I'm witness to a lot of arterial bleeding then I'm clearly doing it wrong
😉 - though some of the researchers I've met would argue the exact opposite.)
I'm also afraid to mention that I am no longer in a medical setting - last week was my final week in the labs: but that didn't stop the door hitting me on the way out!
And that brings me to the lesson of the week...
I learned that if a sudden gust of wind blows a heavy fire-door shut, you should not under any circumstances put your hand out to try and stop the door from smacking into you. Instead, you should try to dodge through it - that way the door will catch you between the door and the jamb! It turns out wind-powered doors can and will quite happily crack four of your ribs!
It's very important that if you witness this, you should laugh your *** off at the person getting caught in the door: what you, the witness and fellow lab-assistant haven't realised is that because your partner finishes up tomorrow, that you will be the one carrying all their stuff out to the car for them since they can't lift anything heavy! They will thank you with beer, so it may have been worth it.
What an interesting two-last-days that turned out to be! Did you know if you cough and reflexively double over while looking through a (binocular) microscope you can poke BOTH your eyes at the SAME time?
*The word of the day is serosanguinous!