neosporin

[dragonlady7]

the author, animal husbandry, animal slaughter, gross dead animal nonsense

via https://ift.tt/2ScvNPG

At one point today whilst feverishly trying to catch us up on chickens (we had… a hectic start… the pullets had gotten out of their fence [sister suspects there was a hawk attack that frightened them, actually] and one of the largish pigs was out so half the crew had to run up and help fix that so we started slaughter with three eviscerators manning everything past the scald tank, and only one of us was tough enough to take the heads off, the other two of us were too squeamish, it was generally hilarious but also meant that we wound up with a huge backlog of chickens to eviscerate by the time everyone else got back)–

cut, for potential squick; there’s blood, but not mine, and a cut, that is mine, and knives, but not necessarily in the order you’d think; still, if that’s not a combo that appeals to you, then please do pass by, and if the cut doesn’t work, well, I’ll put in an extra carriage return and an apology. _

well, I misjudged the distance on something, and sliced my palm with my eviscerating knife. (The knives we use aren’t that big, but I religiously sharpen them, so they’re like razors. I can’t find the exact ones, but I think they’re Victorinox, and they’re basically paring knives, with bright orange thick plastic handles and like 3″ blades.)

BUT.

I set the knife down and peered in concern at my hand, but of course my hand was covered in blood because I was literally in the middle of cleaning a chicken. I squeezed at where I thought the injury must be, and no more blood appeared, but there was kind of a lot of blood anyway, and it was settling into the lines and creases of my hand, so it was hard to make out the injury. It had been long enough that it should have started to bleed by now, and no more blood was appearing. I finally grabbed my sprayer– we have several of those handled sprayer thingies with rotating heads that let you pick a different spray pattern that hang down next to the counter, so there was one propped on my liver-collection pot right there. I sprayed my hand down and squinted at it and sure enough, I could feel a cut but I couldn’t see one, and whatever was there wasn’t actively bleeding. Which was great, because then I didn’t have to stop work and go bandage it and put a glove on. That’s the rule– no open skin, no bleeding on the food, but other than that it’s fine.

For the rest of the day I was fine but it would sting whenever I handled anything too filthy. (Chicken blood was fine, but soap wasn’t, and neither was picking up dirty things and such. Cleanup was… interesting.)

Anyway I am going to Neosporin the shit out of this and sleep with a band-aid over it; I can see the cut now that my hands aren’t filthy, and I can see that it’s not all the way through the skin, but chicken day is so filthy that anything through enough layers of skin is going to get infected. So we’ll see.

I thought I should document my astonishing luck, though. That should not have worked out fine. Hopefully the antibiotic cream will see that it does…

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*sends you all good healing vibes*

(but the cut tag didn't work.)