I’m not fazed by the sight of blood

CMI Columnist

The sight of blood has never slowed me down, whether it was mine or someone else’s.

One of the best examples of this occurred back in the old days of newspaper layout when we worked with sharp items like X-Acto knives. One day I ran one of those little knives to the hilt in the palm of my hand. When I pulled it out I found that blood was spurting with each heartbeat and artistically painting designs on the tile floor.

I found this all very interesting at first because I knew with pressure it would stop and I wasn’t going to bleed to death. My co-worker wasn’t taking it all so well, however. Suffice to say it is extremely hard to hold pressure on a wound to your palm while catching a fainting woman.

Recently my wife developed a callus-looking growth on her middle toe and eventually managed to take the head of it off accidentally. I played nurse and cleaned and bandaged it. I remember being extra careful to reduce the chance of infection.

Either my poor nursing skills or the fact that my wife rarely puts shoes on around the house came back to haunt us. When I inspected the sore the other night after she complained that it was painful I knew instantly that toes shouldn’t look like ripe grapes.

The next day at the doctor I somehow found myself with a front row seat for the filleting of one of my wife’s toes. OK, the doctor didn’t actually fillet it, just opened it up to drain, but I took great pleasure telling my wife that’s what we were going to do.

I felt like they needed more light so I whipped out the flashlight app on my cell phone and assisted. Didn’t faze me a bit as it started draining while the doctor was shooting the local anesthetic into the sore area.

When I was really young I would have said that my mother was probably the one who blessed me with my steadiness with the sight of blood and pus. She was great at digging out splinters and stickers or draining blisters or zits. But I found out she had a chink in her armor.

After I had an emergency appendectomy in high school I struggled with infection during my recovery. Soon an abscess the size of a grapefruit had developed in the area of the incision. My doctor didn’t like it a bit on a checkup in his office and immediately took care of draining it with a scalpel.

When he cut into it the result was dramatic and my dear old mother went white and crumpled back in her chair in the corner.

I’ve dressed my wife’s various surgical incisions over the years and spent years reporting from accident scenes as a reporter and still blood doesn’t alarm me. There must be some vampire genes floating in my veins I guess.

Karl Terry, a former publisher of the Quay County Sun, writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]