A true “dirty blood” story

A couple of years ago I was in the back section of a large hardware store looking for a tube of weather proofing caulk. There were a few varieties with some laying horizontally on a lower shelf and some standing vertically with the nozzles pointing upwards on the upper eye-level top shelf. As I reached for one on the top shelf, I accidentally knocked over some of the others. As I instantly reached down to catch the first falling tube, a second falling tube hit the top of my hand on my thumb with the pointed tip right on a blood vessel. It pierced the skin deep enough that there was an 18-inch-high squirt of blood from that blood vessel. I was shocked but knew that I wasn’t a bleeder and for me bleeding from cuts always stops within a few seconds and holding a piece of clean tissue pressed against the wound usually coagulates within a minute or 2. I did this and there was barely any seepage after the initial squirt. After a minute or so, while holding the tissue pressed against the wound, I got a store clerk’s attention and asked for some absorbent paper towels to clean up the bloody mess in the store. She brought some wet paper towels and asked if I had some sort of bleeding disorder as she couldn’t understand why there was so much blood. I explained that I did not have a blood disorder but probably would have bled out if I did. I didn’t tell her what happened as I didn’t think she would understand or believe me anyways. I cleaned up the blood on the shelf, floor and the other product but told her I had to leave one caulk tube that had a blood-stained label that I couldn’t clean with the paper towels. I gave her all the cleaning material and was then able to remove the tissue from the wound. I picked out the tube of caulk that I wanted, and proceeded to the store checkout. When I got home I put a band-aid with some ointment over the wound just to protect the weak area until it could completely heal.



My theory on what happened is that if a person is reasonably healthy and their blood system finds any opportunity to jettison any “dirty” material through a skin surface wound, it will do so without hesitation and then immediately return to a normal equilibrium. That is the reason for that squirt of blood.

Btw, I am in my late 70's.