Splinters
Being a kiddo in the great Pacific Northwest means you are probably spending a lot of time outdoors with your card-holding REI-member parents. And when left to the wooded elements, splinters are bound to happen.
Most splinters that kiddos get are small and only poke through the very outer layer of skin. Kids often will not complain about them. If they are not painful and just in that top layer, you can just leave them alone, and they will eventually fall out on their own with very little chance of infection or other fanfare. Now if they have a painful splinter and let you try to pull it out with small tweezers, go for it! But I do not know very many kiddos who will let you go after a splinter more than once, and it often takes a few tries to get out the little piece of wood. So with your first attempt, make it count:
Clean the area with running water
With the tweezers, grab the splinter as close to the skin as possible and try to draw it out in a straight line at the same angle it goes into the skin
Once removed, you can squeeze the area gently to see if there is slight bleeding that can fill in the small hole caused by the splinter and even push some of the dirt out
Clean the area again with running water, dry the area gently, and put a little Band-Aid over it
If your kiddo won’t let you touch the splinter, then the first thing that I do is soak the area in the bathtub or in a small dish of warm water. By soaking the fragment of wood, the area of wood exposed to the water will swell and start pushing its way out slowly. Another way to “soak” the splinter is by putting Vaseline on it, which may work better for kids who are reluctant to keep their hand in a bowl of water for more than a couple of minutes. If those things are not working and the splinter is painful, we can always examine it in clinic and see if it needs to come out. With the tools we have in clinic, we can safely remove a splinter in a sterile fashion, limiting the chances of infection.