Sharp things hurt

I didn't have the materials necessary for creating the weapon I had planned for this week, so I decided to just tell a story instead.

It's another story about one of my injuries. I hope it reminds anyone reading this blog that messing with sharp things can be potentially hazardous to one's health.

The story involves one of the older gadgets that I had created, an arm-blade of sorts, designed to propel a blade from a tube attached to my arm . The weapon was designed to give the user a concealable and lethal edge, capable of turning any fistfight into a very one sided shank fest.
The design for the weapon consisted of a metal skewer bound to a chopstick wrapped in scotch tape. The skewer was pushed into a tube and I used rubber bands as a means of propelling the blade. It was designed as a melee weapon, stopping once it reached a length. The design was faulty and unreliable, prone to breakdowns when the weapon was left cocked for a long period of time. It was one of these malfunctions that ultimately led to my injury.

First and foremost, the injury I received was a hundred percent my fault. I was stupid enough to have been tinkering with this object in a class. The main tube had broken and the stopping mechanism was faulty, I had attempted to fix it at the bus stop, but I hadn't managed to fix it before the bus came.
During one of my classes, after all the students had settled down and the teacher had started lecturing, I pulled the gadget out to finish repairing it. Five minutes or so after I had started fixing it, I had managed to get the thing working again. However, as I was putting it back into my back pack the trigger of the weapon was bumped. At the time, the weapon was cocked and loaded. The barrel also happened to be pointed at my hand.

The blade flew into my hand the moment the trigger released it. the searing pain made me jerk my hand back, effectively dislodging the metal skewer. My hand was throbbing, the blade had stuck a good inch. Unfortunately I was still in class. The teacher hadn't noticed anything and I had intended to keep it that way. My hand was bleeding so I wrapped some tissues around my wrist and used rubber bands to cut off the blood flow long enough for me to somewhat bandage my wound. Having received a puncture wound from a rusty metal skewer, I had two major concerns. The first one being tetanus, which would effectively kill if i didn't get to a hospital. The second one being sepsis, which would also effectively kill me if I didn't get to a hospital. With these threats in mind, I downed several amoxicillin  pills. I also opened a few of the capsules and rubbed the powder into my wound (no idea if that did anything). Having done everything that I could at the time, I waited for the class to end. When the bell rang, I sprinted to the bath room, washed the blood from my hand and massaged my wrist to restore blood flow. By then, the wound had sealed up (puncture wounds seal very quickly, which can be problematic as it can trap bacteria into the wound), and my hand was a very disturbing shade of purple. Once I had restored blood flow to my hand, I continued on with the rest of my classes.

As a result of the puncture wound, I suffered a localized infection in my hand. The infection effectively paralyzed two fingers and made moving any of the others very painful. I had gotten my tetanus booster and the infection didn't seem to spread, so I got away pretty lucky. I was also lucky in the sense that the blade had stabbed into the fleshy part between my two fingers. Had it hit a tendon, I would most likely not have use of my hand or at the very least, a few of my fingers.

Sharp things are dangerous, one should always exercise great caution around them.