Theresa Lewis



When my brother Daniel went on a trip to the Eastern Coast of Canada, he had a minor accident, or so he believed. He had been walking on some slippery rocks along the coast and he slipped and fell. He instinctively stuck out his right arm to break his fall. In doing so, he came down on a twig that punctured his flesh and drove itself deep up inside his arm from the wrist almost to his elbow. Since I was not with him at the time, I do not know how he managed to remove the twig from his arm, but somehow, he did. He said he was sure he got it out intact, but within a few days, his arm began to fester. He went to the hospital in Halifax where he was told they would have to amputate his arm. Daniel freaked out and left with his festering appendage still attached.

When he returned to Montreal, he went to the hospital. The emergency room doctor gave my brother antibiotics. He opened an area in my brother’s arm to drain the infection. The doctor found and removed a few little pieces of bark under the skin down near the wrist that had not come out when the twig was removed. Once Daniel’s arm was cleaned and bandaged he was sent on his way with a ten day course of antibiotics.

Even though the antibiotics were effective in clearing up the infection, his arm continued to hurt. Finally, one day while we were in the countryside visiting our parents, his arm once again became swollen and very painful. Daniel asked me to help him to do surgery on his arm. He went to his room and came back with a bottle of whiskey and a scalpel and tweezers. I was surprised that he had surgical instruments so I asked him who, other than a surgeon travels around with a surgical kit on their person. He laughed and told me they were instruments from his frog dissecting kit from university.

We went into the bathroom and locked the door. With his arm laid steady on top of the clothes dryer, we began the procedure. He could feel exactly where the pain was and where the bumps under the skin were. I watched as he took a swig of liquor and began to cut up his arm.

As he opened a slit about two inches long, I could clearly see pieces of bark still embedded under the skin and I slowly extracted them, all the while trying not to focus on the “icky” side of what we were doing. I thought I got it all, but he said there was more. He took the tweezers from me and poked around inside his arm and he pulled out the biggest piece of bark. It was a good inch and a half long. It was freaky to see all the bark debris that we had extracted from his arm. A lot of infection was released in the process. Once he was done, he was sweating heavily and so was I, but for a different reason. He took another swig of liquor and then poured some into his wound.

I have no doubt that it was painful. Daniel held on tight to the side of the bathroom sink while I bandaged up his arm. We were both shaking. When we came out of the bathroom together, our parents wanted to know what we were up to in the bathroom together with the door locked. We explained the surgery process to our horrified parents. When our mother found out our surgical implements were from Daniel’s frog dissecting kit, she said she felt weak and shaky.

Daniel’s arm healed pretty quickly after our surgical procedure. Several years have passed since and Daniel has one hundred percent usage of his right arm which is good since he is right-handed.