4 ms·
I remember in like 4th grade I stabbed myself in the leg with a pencil on accident and snapped a piece of the "lead" off in my leg. My brain spiraled for weeks
by sharkweek 3y ago
I remember in like 4th grade I stabbed myself in the leg with a pencil on accident and snapped a piece of the "lead" off in my leg.
My brain spiraled for weeks thinking I had essentially poisoned myself and would be dying shortly.
Finally told my parents, who said "okay lets go talk to the doctor" who, very sweetly, told me that little piece of graphite in my leg would cause essentially no harm.
It's still there, a little blue-ish dot under my skin.
- cancerhacker 3y agoI have the same thing in the palm of my hand - was bumping a pencil along a wall, also in fourth grade, ish. I knew it was graphite and wouldn't hurt me, but I was too afraid of it hurting to winkle it out, and it just healed over.
- nkurz 3y agoI spent some time puzzling over what "winkle" might be a typo for before realizing it was a British verb I was unfamiliar with: "chiefly British : to displace, remove, or evict from a position" Apparently the etymology is the periwinkles are difficult to remove from their shells: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winkle https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winkle
- dtgriscom 3y ago"She's horribly good at winkling." https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7a2639f3-cf03-4223-bc46-5ae44b598a17 https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7a2639f3-cf03-4223-bc46-5ae44b5...
- Arrath 3y agoAs a child I was walking through my room and stepped on a fallen pencil, it rolled under my foot in just the right way: it shot out and stabbed me in the ball of my other foot! Most random thing, and I've still got the dot these 30 years later.
- inetknght 3y agoOnce upon a time I was stabbed in the knee with a pencil. It's still there 30+ years later. Both the knee and the pencil mark. It doesn't hurt at all.
- doubled112 3y agoI have a pencil stab wound from grade school as well. Apparently there are many of us pencil stab victims. The same girl came at me with scissors later on but she wasn't as successful that time.
- lostlogin 3y agoI’m an outlier in the HN crowd - I was the stabber, not the stabee. Sorry Ben!
- sublinear 3y agoYou're not an outlier. #thuglyfe
- brnaftr361 3y agoSame, though on both counts it was totally unintentional. Sorry, Logan.
- timmg 3y agoI have almost the exact same story. Except my older sister freaked out about me potentially having "lead poison." She called my *nurse* mom at work. Mom said it would be fine and she'd take a look when she got home. Mom was pretty old-school, fwiw :) I still have the blue dot next to my knee.
- david422 3y agoI've got a blue mark in the palm of my hand from where it was stabbed in maybe 1st or 2nd grade. I don't think I actually left a piece of pencil in there ... I think perhaps the skin was colored grey and just stayed that way?
- alnico 3y agoI too was stabbed in grade school; twice actually, in the same hand. I think both times for pestering girls as they were writing, lol. I guess I deserved it. Both left visible gray marks under the healed skin...one on a finger and the other in the soft tissue between my thumb and index finger. Years later, in my 30s, I was handling some super strong magnets and felt tugging on the tissue next to my thumb, indeed that magnet was pulling strongly on that piece of embedded graphite. I thought that was strange because either the graphite had impurities of iron in it or my body had accumulated iron around it. Some years later I would develop random knuckle pain in a couple of the nearby fingers. I was skeptical that this foreign object was to blame...but I convinced a doctor to do some minor in-office surgery to remove it. The doctor made an incision and using forceps tried to find and pull it out. He couldn't find it (which he initially warned me about and suggested ultrasound guidance) and asked me to get out my magnet and pull the object up...his forceps immediately snapped to the magnet, I didn't flinch but was laughing internally. He grabbed the object, which was probably half the size of a sesame seed...much smaller than what he was expecting based on the amount of tissue that was being pulled up by the magnet. Months would pass and I no longer had pain in those knuckles, that was probably 5 years ago. The other stab mark, which is on a different finger, never caused any issues. The nurse afterwards said, "I cannot believe you did that." I chuckled. I can now say that I've assisted in my own surgery ;-)
- 0_____0 3y agoWhat caused the graphite fragment to be ferromagnetic?
- kbelder 3y agoMy older brother jammed a pencil into an old-school dart gun and fired it at me, tagging me about half an inch to the right of my eye. Left the same permanent blue dot. Semi-permanent, actually; it faded after a couple decades. Probably wormed it's way into my brain. Sometimes I'm shocked I'm still alive.
- userbinator 3y agoEven if it was real lead, I doubt you'd suffer much in the way of health effects either.
- GolfPopper 3y agoI was stabbed with a pencil in the arm in 4th grade, tip broke off. Had the little gray-blue dot in my arm for years. I could feel it if I poked at it, which I eventually stopped doing. I'd check it, or show it to someone every once in awhile. Sometime in 40s, I went to check it and it had disappeared.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HnUser12 3y agoI recently learned that there’s a subreddit dedicated to this. r/pencilStabbers.