About 12 years ago I was cleaning out a severely overgrown and unkept yard of a house that my friends' just bought (they're fraternal twins) with a machete. As I was swinging through, there was a concrete post that we didn't know about and I hit it very hard. The crazy amount of vibration after impact felt like I got struck by lightning and I dropped the machete. As it was falling, my thoughts were to not move my l away too fast! I thought I'm better off not moving my leg at all, there's no way the machete is sharp enough to do any damage. I thought worst case scenario would be a scratch, maybe a cut, but nothing too bad. So, I just let it fall......
that was a very bad idea!!! It managed to fall down, tip first, and ended up almost going through my entire leg. It went in right next to my shin and into my calf muscle, just over 5" deep into my leg. Then, I pulled it out. One of my friends was staring at me the entire time and his (he and his twin brother can't handle seeing a tiny drop of blood) face turned that yellowish green. He was okay for about 3 seconds because it took about 3 seconds for it to start bleeding after I pulled it out, and it wasn't just a couple of drops of blood! It looked like Niagara Falls when it started bleeding, hahaha. As soon as that happened, he fainted. So, I hopoed back to the front door and told his brother to bring out a rope or belt that he no longer uses, a fresh clean towel or an entire roll of paper towels, and hydrogen peroxide or alcohol (preferably hydrogen peroxide because I didn't want to feel the burn from alcohol on such a big, deep wound like that!). Surprisingly, I didn't feel any burn from the alcohol. I guess it's an adrenaline thing but I seriously didn't feel any burn from the alcohol and I didn't feel any pain from the machete (to be clear, just that day. I felt plenty of pain the next few days). It's always interesting that I can put a machete through my leg and not feel any pain, yet if I suffer a tiny paper cut it hurts like hell!!!
Anyway, I had to get about 2 dozen staples to close the wound. I was extremely lucky not to split, cut, or damage any nerves, tendons, ligaments or bones. It only went through skin and muscles. I didn't think there was any possibility that the machete would go through my shin. I thought maybe it could hit my thigh or the top of my knee, but I didn't think it would have the power, direction, sharpness, etc, etc to even cut my skin and certainly wouldn't have the correct angle to even touch my shin, but somehow it did. The doctor pretty much refused to believe that I was standing up when it happened because of how deep it went into my leg and the angle it went into my leg. It's interesting that the scar from that healed incredibly well and is very hard to see, but an incision from a surgery I had 15 years ago is almost impossible not to see.
Anyway, the moral of the story is be careful with any knife and make sure you know exactly what your using that knife for and make sure that you know exactly what your cutting into. I learned that knives don't work so well with concrete.
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