A tale about a stick.

Once upon a time, I was visiting my family in California and my dad and I decided to go mountain biking. It was New Year's day (Chad was in Utah), and we decided to try out Holy Jim Canyon Trail. Well, I decided to try it out; my dad is a local to the area, the perks of being a mountain bike junkie. The day started out awesome, with a bumpy half hour drive to the trailhead first thing in the morning, and then it was wilderness time. The first part of the ride was a bike-and-hike section crossing over a small stream, and then up a set of switchbacks.


Everything was going fine, when all of a sudden I went around the corner of a switchback, hit a rock, went off course a bit, and then fell (with my bike, I couldn't get my feet unclipped) back over the trail, cushioning my fall with my left forearm. Unfortunately there was a stump in the way and I managed to sustain a small gash and a little piece of stick puncturing my skin.

This is the stump.

Much to my dismay, my dad only had the emergency supplies for fixing a bike, so we waited a few minutes until some hikers came up who happened to have a first aid kit. We pulled out the tiny little stick (maybe 1/4 of an inch), patched up the wound, and then were on our way. I wanted to keep riding seeing as it was my last day in sunny Southern California, so we kept going for a good 45 minutes. All the while, my arm started to hurt more and more and every bump I hit (which was a lot) became increasingly more painful. I finally had enough and we turned around to head back down the way we came. Quite a few tears and an hour and a half later we were back at the car and headed home.

Me posing next to the stump... post fall.

That day, I decided to go to the emergency room because I could twist my arm at all and it hurt like crazy. At the ER, we got an x-ray and they assessed my wound, telling me that I had a small hematoma. They put a big bandage on it and sent me home. Looking back now, it is apparent that they did NOT do a very good job cleaning it out. The next day was Kaitlin's wedding and my huge bandage matched great with my bridesmaid dress.

For the next month, my arm still hurt quite often. Everytime I slightly bumped it or someone touched it, pain would shoot down my arm. Fortunately for me, most of my professors in the nursing program are nurse practitioners and so I was constantly asking them what I should do about the hematoma and the constant pain. After a month, it finally got to the point when my professor told me I just needed to go see the doctor because obviously something wasn't right.

This is what my arm looked like at the end of January... there was a huge bump, and when I squeezed my arm, it would stand out. Freaky, I know.

Finally, I went and saw the doctor at the student health center and he told me that he thought there was a foreign body still in my arm. The following week, I came back so that he could surgically re-open the wound and see what he could find. He gave me a 1/2 inch incision below the other scar and started looking around for something that didn't belong. After the first 7 or 8 minutes I was a little concerned that I was just being paranoid, that there was nothing wrong with me and the doctor wasn't going to find anything. All of a sudden, he said, "Hey, I think I just broke a cyst, fluid's coming out." At that moment I looked over and he pulled out a stick! That's right... a stick. But not just any old stick, a 1 1/2 inch stick! I couldn't believe it, there had been a stick in my arm for over a month!

I asked the doctor if I could please keep it, so after getting it cultured, he gave me this nifty keepsake.

Moral of the story is, you never try and break your fall by hitting a stump and if you are ever in the emergency room, make sure they THOROUGHLY clean out a wound before sending you home.

The End.