My dad use to remove splinters all the time. With a needle and some tweezers. I remember standing next to him holding my hand out, cringing, and him telling me to stay still as he dug around in the palm of my hand. I never liked it.
Recently, we had our first in-home surgery experience with Jacob. He had 2 ticks and 3 splinters as the result of rolling around at the soccer field followed by running barefoot through the sprinkler over the seed and straw in the front yard. We knew he wouldn't like it. We prepared for it. What we didn't know was that it would take 3 of us to successfully remove all the foreign objects from Jacob's body. On a Monday the first tick came off easy. The second tick, not so much. Following a visit with our neighbor PA friend, the ticks went to the dermatologist to confirm what we feared... one head was not removed with one of the ticks.
We waited until the next night to work on the splinters. Jacob immediately began thrashing around. 3 little splinters, two on the bottom of his foot, one on his finger. You would have thought someone was trying to amputate a limb without any anesthesia! Pat and I took turns holding him while the other tried to catch a glimpse at his foot/finger. He would bend and contort his hand, foot, body as soon as we would look at a splinter. When we flicked on a flashlight to help with our sight, he would scream. We would pour some alcohol on a cotton ball, and he would cry, "No Daddy, no!" before anything touched his body.
The drama was in full effect. After a while it became comical to Pat and I. We wouldn't be doing anything and he would make his body convulse over and over, tears streaming down his face. When we would get ready to try and remove a splinter he'd beg us to "just use your fingers" and when we did, "don't pinch me, it makes me sad." Love his heart. 150 long minutes later, the last splinter was out. Yes, 2 and 1/2 hours to remove 3 splinters. The third splinter took the longest to even get to. But, once Pat learned that Jacob had seen a taxi toy at CVS earlier in the day, and that Mommy had said Jacob couldn't have it...well, we had bribe material. Jacob sat fairly still in Daddy's lap once the taxi was promised. The first time of the night we didn't have to hold still both arms and legs, and he let me push out the splinter on about 15 seconds.
All the drama, tears and screaming for over two hours and Jacob looked at me and said,
"Good job Mommy, let's go get the taxi. We can all go together."
He held his Daddy's hand and proudly pulled him through CVS right to the location of the taxi. He handed it to Pat and said, "This is it! Let's go pay for it!" As Pat paid for the overpriced toy he looked down at Jacob and jokingly said something about the toy costing a lot of money.
Jacob turned around and looked up at Pat and with the most serious tone said,
"Yeah. But it's yellow, white, black and RED, Dad! It has red on the taxi."
We could do nothing but laugh. Guess the Red on the taxi made it all worth it.
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