Snoskred Snacks #5

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It is time to welcome my good friend the Avocado to Snoskred Snacks. Given my deep love for them it seems incredible to me that I’ve written 4 of these posts without them appearing! The Aldi avocados were not very ripe when I first started writing these posts, though I bought some not ripe ones and left them out on the counter for a few days to ripen them up.

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On this particular day I had a boiled egg left over from previous snack days, so I thought I would use it up and layer it under the avocado. I saved that snack right till the end to eat.

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On top of the avocado I generally like chicken or turkey. Aldi sells a sliced chicken and turkey. Both of these are “manufactured meat” products not fresh chicken breast and turkey sliced, which would be my first preference. However those things are more expensive, more difficult to seek out, don’t keep as long, and are not the kind of thing I would use for an every day snack.

I would prefer to roast some chicken breast myself and slice it, and that might be something I look into given I just read the ingredients for these manufactured meat things when writing this post. *shudder* Nutritionally these slices are probably not awesome. The idea here is healthy snacks, so these might be off the menu for me in the future.

When Snacks Attack

I clearly remember my home ec teacher telling me “I’ve never once cut myself without looking at what I was doing and thinking “This is a really stupid thing to do” right before I stabbed myself with the knife”.

For me it has always been the total opposite. I never, ever see my injury coming ahead of time. So in late October when I was making lunch on a Saturday, to discover I had actually stuck a knife through the avocado pit, through the outside of the avocado, and straight through my left index finger was an unhappy surprise.

Do not fear, I will not show you any photos of the injury – instead I will show you a photo of the avocado with the knife still in it. This is some hours later after I got home from the hospital.

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Everything is very hazy to me about how it actually happened. I do remember looking down and seeing the tip of the knife sticking out of my finger and vaguely wondering what the heck it was doing there before realising I had cut myself. However the actuality of what had happened did not make proper sense in my brain for some time.

Somehow – without thinking about it or perhaps in a panic- I removed the knife from my hand, and went over to the sink to rinse out the cut.I rinsed it out in the sink and then wrapped some paper towel around it thinking it wasn’t too bad.

I was keeping pressure on the cut and it seemed like it had sealed nicely, no blood was coming out of the cut at all. But where was all the other blood coming from? It was then I realised the cut I was putting pressure on was the exit wound, and there was an *entry* wound on the other side of my finger.

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That is around the time I went into shock, waves of nausea were washing over me, and I felt like I was going to pass out. Knowing that this was a bad cut, The Other Half was out for the day with my car, and I would need to go to hospital for a tetanus shot and to have it cleaned out at a minimum, I called my parents right away. Mum arrived soon afterwards and off we went to the hospital.

They took a quick look at the finger, bandaged it up nicely to await the doctor, and then asked when my last Tetanus shot was. I remember it clearly – when I was attacked by the dog at age 16, so over 20 years ago. Ok, you get a tetanus shot today. What a huge amount of fun that was, NOT.

Back out to the waiting room, to wait, for about 2 hours. Then I got called back in and seen by two doctors who could not figure out how I had managed to do this. They were trying to tell me this was not an entry and exit wound but two completely separate cuts, because I would have hit bone if this was a puncture wound.

I ended up having to draw the knife for them and I wished I had taken a photo of the knife before leaving home. There is a tip for your next emergency room visit. :) I explained this was a filleting knife and it was entirely possible it had hit – and cut – bone on the way through. The blade was facing the bone. Oh, you’ll need an x-ray then.

Back to the waiting room to wait for the x-ray porter, who arrived maybe 30 minutes later, x-ray done, then another long wait, then I was called in and told nothing was seen on the x-ray, no need to clean out the wound, it will be fine because I washed it myself and because I had been waiting so long it had started to heal already, and they put on a band-aid. I could have done that myself at home.

In fact I probably could have just kept pressure on it and then put a bandaid on and it would likely have been fine but I figured that when you stick a knife *through* your finger, that is potentially a serious injury and requires medical attention. Around here there are no doctors open on the weekend, so that means a hospital trip, and I don’t have any tetanus shots at home.

It was an incredibly stupid thing to do, and the wrong knife to be using for this particular job. I’m usually fairly good with my knife skills – obviously, considering I have gone over 20 years without a tetanus shot.

The good news is, the tetanus shot hurts far more than the cut ever did. The cut had entirely healed over before the huge lump in my arm from the shot went away.

The bad news is, avocado is off the menu for the time being. I always have a lot of trouble getting the pits out. :/

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17 thoughts on “Snoskred Snacks #5

  1. Avocado layered with boiled egg looks like a tasty snack! But I’m with you on having trouble removing avocado pits. I never hurt myself when doing “dangerous” things – just in mundane ways. I ended up with stitches due to a bread knife last year when I was practicing reasonably safe cutting techniques but it turned out what I was cutting was still frozen inside, causing the knife to skip.

    • It has been one of my favourite snacks in the past 10 weeks. I’m hoping to buy some more avocado this week and see how I go with it. I did lose some confidence in my knife skills and there was another incident with a knife skipping when I was cutting some chicken which ended with two small cuts this week.. losing confidence actually makes things worse for me in the kitchen, now I am uncertain and leaving a lot of cutting to The Other Half.. :)

  2. I hardly have any problems work removing avocado pits. My method is to push the knife firmly down on the pit and twist it around to loosen it from the flesh. I’ve had no incidents so far *crosses fingers* :)

  3. Ouch! I hope you recover quickly (and learn how to pit an avocado safely). Many years ago I experienced a similar accident and I recall thinking, that can’t be as bad as it looks! The pain doesn’t seem to set in until later.

    • The ER folks did not think much of my injury, but me personally when there is an entry and exit wound, that should merit some local anaesthetic and a really good clean out with antiseptic. I’m glad they didn’t do it, because pain and needles! But I also think it was lucky not to get infected. My clean out was not especially long or very well done and I was in shock.

      I think I was lucky because I always keep my knives super clean and that no bits of pit or skin got stuck in there.. :)

  4. I love avocado and guacamole and would put it on just about everything, within reason! That knife injury sounds terrible; they bleed so much that one does go into shock. I love those orange yolks; the only time I’ve ever seen them was in Thailand. :)

  5. Thankfully, I’ll never need to know how to pit an avocado, since I don’t eat them.
    Ouch on the finger piercing!! Glad to know you and the finger both survived.

    • I did not eat them when growing up but I grew to love them. It has been two weeks and one day since my last avocado. I really, deeply miss them! ;) I was alternating days with my snacks – one avocado, one tomato, one avocado, one tomato.. but it has been 2 weeks of just tomatoes now..

  6. You managed to make that avocado look like a work of art!

    And I’m glad you announced at the beginning of the story that it had a happy ending. I don’t like reading about gore, so I was able to skip all that :-)

    • I’m surprisingly good with gore when it happens to other people but not at all good when it is mine.. :) That is possibly understandable. It is odd, because the finger has actually begun to hurt more now than it did when it happened.. :/

  7. Ouch! I once sliced a piece of my finger off when chopping parsley. My mom gives me a wash cloth to stop the bleeding. Normally they’re very soft, but when you slice a piece of your finger off, they feel like sandpaper!! Needless to say, I couldn’t use the parsley in my recipe.

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