What should have been a lovely morning in the deer woods for me turned into a trip to the Emergency Room.
I was getting set up before daylight this morning and saw a dead tree branch I wanted to get out of the way for a shooting lane. I placed my mini-mag flashlight in my mouth to hold like I've done thousands of times before to have both hands free. I pulled on the branch and when it snapped, I ended up hitting myself right in the mouth which then pushed the flashlight into the back of my throat. My first reaction was " Holy crap, that really didn't just happen". But then the pain set in and the taste of blood filled my mouth.
I spit a couple mouth fulls on the nice tracking snow we had this morning and then texted my bro-in-law who I was hunting with. I wasn't exactly in the mood for a long text so I just texted "I need help". I needed him to take a look inside my mouth to assess the damage because I obviously couldn't look inside my own mouth without a mirror. Then I started to gag on the blood. My bro-in-law heard me gagging and was thinking the worst - like I stuck myself with a broadhead or something. I could speak fine and explained what happened. He looked inside and said I better get to a doctor.
So off we went to the ER. The doc took a look and then went to get another doc to get another opinion on what to do. They decided there probably wasn't a need to put in any stitches and it had stopped bleeding by then. So I thought they'd just let me go. However, the doc thought it would be a good idea if they did a CT scan to make sure I didn't do any damage to my carotid artery. That scared me a bit and I started thinking I could have killed myself with a mini-mag flashlight. :eek: The CT scan results turned out OK with just some signs of swelling so I was released with a antibiotic prescription just to avoid any chance of infection.
I got a nasty cut in the back of my throat, some bruising, and swelling, but I'll be fine and it could have turned out much worse. I'll be on a liquid/soft diet for a while.
The irony of all this is that I had a head light in my pocket, but was in too much of a rush to dig it out. I won't make that mistake again.