So it was two days ago now, I was removing a line of declining madrones along a driveway. Basically stuff small enough to pick apart with a battery rear-handle saw and battery pole saw, and some very easy felling. Tiny by my usual standard of work. I was doing my thing, when I reached up with the pole saw to cut a section just like I'd been doing all job thus far, and the piece I cut wound up sliding down the pole-saw shaft right into me. A bad cut on my part, in hindsight. I reached out with my left hand to deflect it away from my face, and the stub of a dead twig/limb (1/2"-1") caught my forearm as it fell to the ground. One thing to know about madrone, is when it dies it gets VERY hard, and when dead sections break, it tends to break into VERY sharp points. That point dug in, and peeled off about a perfect 90* skin flap before it fell to the ground.
Right away I could see it was a somewhat significant wound, so I shut off the chipper (I was working solo), went to the cab of the truck, grabbed a t-shirt to tie around my arm to soak up the blood and put pressure on it. I do have gauze and various medical tape/wrap in all my trucks, but I was pretty dirty and it was bleeding a lot, and I knew I needed something larger that wouldn't just immediately become saturated in blood and need changing. I moved the chip truck and chipper out of the driveway, then asked the customer for a ride to the local medical clinic which luckily was only about 3 minutes away, as I was working right on the edge of town. A very rare situation actually. He was totally cool and drove me there. I walked up to the desk, told them what happened and about 5 minutes later had a nurse cleaning the wound for the doctor to stitch up a few minutes after that. Wound up with something like 22 stiches, a few internal but mostly just external, pulling all the layers of skin back together. After getting stitched up, I returned to the job and finished chipping what was on the ground, raked/blew off the driveway, and told the customer I'd return in a few days for the two remaining trees.
I had an important job the next morning that I didn't want to reschedule due to having to coordinate with another contractor, and just decided to do it. To my surprise my arm wasn't even really sore, and I spent 6 hours working on a hillside cutting and dragging brush, but starting a cold 400c did hurt... Worked again today with zero issues. The doc told me to keep it bandaged and return in two weeks to remove the stiches, so I'm going to take it easy for a few days, and not climb for at least a week, but keep working and feel lucky it wasn't worse.
Bloody pictures below............
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Right away I could see it was a somewhat significant wound, so I shut off the chipper (I was working solo), went to the cab of the truck, grabbed a t-shirt to tie around my arm to soak up the blood and put pressure on it. I do have gauze and various medical tape/wrap in all my trucks, but I was pretty dirty and it was bleeding a lot, and I knew I needed something larger that wouldn't just immediately become saturated in blood and need changing. I moved the chip truck and chipper out of the driveway, then asked the customer for a ride to the local medical clinic which luckily was only about 3 minutes away, as I was working right on the edge of town. A very rare situation actually. He was totally cool and drove me there. I walked up to the desk, told them what happened and about 5 minutes later had a nurse cleaning the wound for the doctor to stitch up a few minutes after that. Wound up with something like 22 stiches, a few internal but mostly just external, pulling all the layers of skin back together. After getting stitched up, I returned to the job and finished chipping what was on the ground, raked/blew off the driveway, and told the customer I'd return in a few days for the two remaining trees.
I had an important job the next morning that I didn't want to reschedule due to having to coordinate with another contractor, and just decided to do it. To my surprise my arm wasn't even really sore, and I spent 6 hours working on a hillside cutting and dragging brush, but starting a cold 400c did hurt... Worked again today with zero issues. The doc told me to keep it bandaged and return in two weeks to remove the stiches, so I'm going to take it easy for a few days, and not climb for at least a week, but keep working and feel lucky it wasn't worse.
Bloody pictures below............
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