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PS, or by the way, I NEVER use hydrogen peroxide on open wounds.

Peroxide does as much tissue damage as it does bacterial action - if any. This leaves devitalized/dead tissue behind as food the remaining bacteria to feast upon.

Despite decades of surgeons, infectious disease and wound care specialists doing their best to prove one agent works better than another for cleansing wounds, what seems to come up a winner - repeatedly, in one study after another - is TAP water (in the US anyway) or just plain fresh water. Boil if you need to knowing that if water comes to a boil, it’s ALL the samme 212F temp and is sufficient to kill most common organisms. Let it cool and use that.

Tap water is chlorinated (which helps), it’s readily available, there’s plenty of it and you can adjust the temperature. Better would be normal saline or pH bufferred, but the general idea is expediency.

But peroxide? In the words of my microbiology professor in med school, “it fizzes and foams and looks like it’s doing somethign but it’s just burning tissue.” Later studies in my career have borne this out.

FWIW.

It specifically states on most containers in this country at least, that Hydrogen Peroxide should NOT be used on puncture wounds.

Funny-my brother and I were talking about an experience I had as a kid when I was perhaps eight years old.

There was an old, abandoned stable in a farmer’s field across from our house, and it had a hayloft that they used as a “club house”, but I wasn’t big enough to make the necessary climb. I couldn’t reach the roof from a nearby tree, which meant I would not be able to get down.

But being the younger of the kids, I tried and managed to get up. But I couldn’t get down, so in desperation, my brother suggested I hang off the roof and put my legs in a window.

So, I was hanging onto the roof (my armpits and above were still on the roof, so I couldn’t see below me) which stuck out perhaps a foot from the wall with the window, and couldn’t feel it with my feet. So my brother said it was right under my feet and if I let go, my feet would land on it.

Of course, that would never work, but I couldn’t get back up on the roof, so I let go.

I plummeted perhaps ten feet onto a pile of rusty scrap metal consisting of old torn up bed springs and discarded farm implements, and I impaled my right shin on something. Oddly, it didn’t tear my blue jeans, but it was clear I had done something, because I could see blood spreading out around the fabric. With my arm around my older brother’s shoulder, I hobbled to a neighbor’s house and pulled up the leg of my jeans, and saw a hole in my shin oozing blood profusely.

I was sitting by a garden hose, so I poured water over it, and saw the hole appeared to be about an inch in diameter and at least an inch deep. (I can verify the diameter by looking down at my leg now at the scar) I just missed my shin bone, and as I peered into it, I saw a thing that looked like a piece of cooked spaghetti in a tomato sauce of blood. Don’t know what that was, but might have been a blood vessel for all I know.

I was terrified of getting stitches, so I never told my parents about it. It took about a year to heal, and it didn’t heal well. During that time, I kept it hidden, but I remember gnats getting into it and things like that. My dad got orders to Japan where we lived about a year later, and I was walking on a seawall of rocks, slipped, and the whole thing came open again. Then I had to make up a story, because I had been told to stay away from that area, and had also lost my glasses when I fell. But I got a tetanus shot and stitches this time.

Point is, I was talking about this incident with my older brother the other night, and thought “My God, I could have got tetanus, but...as soon as I said it, I laughed.

No. I was accident prone, and probably got more tetanus shots and boosters than any kid I know. The doctors gave them to me like they gave lifesavers to other kids, and even my parents lost track, so there was no chance, none, that I was ever going to get tetanus!