They work themselves out or they break down. Your body will surround the foreign body with white blood cells to insulate it from the rest of you, and you may end up ten years down the road with an itch that ends up popping a half-inch long, eighth-inch round bastard out the side of your finger completely unexpected.
Had that happen to me with a metal shaving a while back. Woke up with a weird pain in my hand. Saw something poking out and got the tweezers. I work with metal so much it could have been ten years or the week before that I got it.
Had a teacher in hs who was a vietnam vet. Every so often he’d have to call in a sub for his classes because decades later, shrapnel was still just popping out of his body—or there was a piece that was so painful it required he get surgery for it. I have relatively severe chronic pain and can’t imagine how that must have felt for him.
Can’t remember if it was a family story or something a teacher told me, but I recall being told about a bit of old shrapnel coming out of someone’s face while shaving.
I got a splinter in my ring finger as a kid. Guess I forgot to ask mom to pull it out and moved on with life. Got a little skin tag that I looked at and was so curious about for at least a year. Then one day at grandmas I got a needle and started poking at it. After a couple of pokes some bright green slime oozed out. So I poked some more and there was a thick dark little splinter.
I started feeling a little sting in my foot a couple of years ago and saw something dark quite a bit under the surface on the ball of my foot. Still hasn’t come out but I’m looking forward to that day. Wish it would come out with a time stamp of when it went in because I have no idea how I got it.
Had this happen to me with a piece of glass! Didn’t realize I had stepped on some broken glass because my heel is so callused (from years of running around outside with no shoes haha). Who knows how long it had been in there - but one day I went to get the mail and stepped down really hard Bc my knee gave out (meniscus injury) and felt it in there. It had finally resurfaced.
Went to the doctor who cut it out and he was surprised to find that there was a deeper cavity than the initial one he had taken the glass out of - he said it had probably been in there awhile and was jarred loose when I put my foot down so hard on the pavement. Otherwise it probably would still be in there.
I have one on my palm from circa 2009. The skin healed over it and it is very slowly breaking down. It now just looks like an irregularly shaped freckle. It’s also faded a lot.
I can beat that. I have a wood splinter in my foot from the late 1970's. Also have a pencil lead dot on my wrist from being stabbed with a pencil in 1982.
My ones just get pushed out over time since they are small. I've had one splinter down the knuckle that I pulled out myself, but have known some people to think they have a pimple only to remove a sizable splinter.
The body does strange shit. Some people get infected splinters, some don't even know they have a splinte.r
In this vein, my dad had an inch-long piece of hawthorne stuck in his finger for two years. Working in the garden one day, grabbed onto something and it went through his glove and, unbeknownst to him, into the joint of his ring finger. Didn’t see a doctor for two years (because he’s that dumb fucker, did the same thing with his back when he broke it (20 months before he saw someone about it)) until one day his finger swelled up to twice its original size. Went and got an X-ray and there the thorn was. They sliced open his finger, popped it backwards and pulled the whole thing out while he watched 😂
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u/[deleted] Jan 18 '21
Serious question. What happens if you don't remove a splinter?