A Boneheaded Mistake

My back pain lately has not been in my favor. I've blogged about it when it initially happened, and then once again a few months later when the pain had not subsided.

With nearly 6 months of chronic back pain, this weekend felt really good so I wanted to take advantage of it. So I went to a nature trail I had never visited and began the exploration. No 20lbs weight in my backpack this time, just a regular water bottle and some bug spray.

I attempted to make some photo-spheres and document the trails for future visitors.

Turns out, having a non-360 camera makes this difficult to produce. So I continued down the trail into the uncharted territories. This time stepping through mud, water, trees and more. I ran into something interesting - a rope tied from a branch in a tree.

I looked around and no one in sight, so I wanted to climb this rope. I knew my back was better than normal and with surgery near, probably never a better time to climb.

This is where the mistake began. I began climbing, interlocking my legs bringing me back to my memory of climbing ropes. As I neared the branch at the top, my back unforunately experienced a spasm. This meant my interlocked legs gave out, leaving just my hands on the rope. I could not hold myself with just my hands on a swinging rope, without my legs.

I began to slide down the rope and my hands were getting too hot - too fast. I let go of the rope and fell to the ground. It wasn't much of a fall, since I landed on my feet, but I immediately felt pain on my right hand. I looked down and it was like a friction burn had ripped the skin off my hand.

Things were not good and I knew my adventure was over. I turned around and began heading for my car. Googling everything I could regarding friction burns. Thankfully, none of my burns looked like anything major. Just a layer or two of skin burned off.

I was 45 minutes from home and my hand was burning, so I set my GPS to the nearest pharmacy and arrived at a CVS about 20 minutes after the incident. My right hand was bleeding pretty badly, but I picked up band-aides, hydrogen peroxide, Neosporin and a large water bottle.

Using my car hood outside a CVS as a cleaning zone. I dumped the water over my hand, burning even more. Clearing all the dust, dirt and junk that got over the wounds by leaving the nature zone.

I thought that was the worse pain of this incident, until I dumped the hydrogen peroxide over the wounds. This foamed on every cut burning so much that I could tell random bystanders wandering into CVS were curious what I was doing.

At this point, I carefully placed Neosporin on band-aides and began placing them all around my hand. This hurt even more, but once the wounds were guarded from open air - the pain subsided. However, each wound still felt like they had their own heartbeat.

The next morning came, the same morning I sit here writing this post. I re-dressed all the wounds when I awoke and the healing one day later looks majorly better.

This incident led me down some interesting rabbit holes of research.

• Hydrogen peroxide kills bacteria and good cells. It is not recommend anymore vs just water and a mild soap.
• Keeping a cut covered heals quicker than allowing it to dry and scab over.
• Don't do stupid things

With that story, don't do dumb things or you pay the price. No photos to see here, because they look pretty disgusting.