The Fish Hook Incident

This story is from the Steinour Family Archives of June 3, 2002. 

Yep, this is exactly where it all started.

            My son David, and his friend Nate (they were 15 at the time) decided to go fishing at Marsh Creek near the covered bridge just down the road from our house.  Later the rest of us--me, my husband Wayne, daughters  Katie (age 12) and Bekah (age 8) and our dog, Ozzie-- decided to walk down to the creek for a little bit, just to go for a stroll and to see how the boys were doing and whether they had had any luck yet.  Wayne took his fishing rod along and decided to walk on up the creek a little ways and fish a little bit himself.

David as a teenager, with a bass caught on another occasion.

Ozzie, an SPCA mutt and generally gentle creature.

 At about 7:00 the girls, Ozzie and I paused to talk to Nate and David for a few minutes while they were changing their lures.  While we were talking I didn’t notice that Ozzie (on his leash) had wandered over to check out a lure that was waving around on the end of one of David’s fishing rods that he wasn’t working with at the time.  All of a sudden, Ozzie yelps and starts to tear off, completely slipping his head out of his collar and leash.  Two of the prongs of one of the treble hooks on the 4-inch long lure were stuck in his nostrils!  I grabbed him and tried to get him to stay still so we could see what we were dealing with.

 Katie dashed back to the house to get wire cutters, because we could see that we would not be able to easily extract the hooks from his nose.  While we were waiting for her, we thought maybe David could use his pliers to remove the hook from the lure, so that the whole heavy lure would not be pulling on Ozzie’s nose.  I was trying to hold Ozzie’s head still with one arm and keep the lure in position with the other hand so David could work on it.  But of course, Ozzie thrashed his head, and suddenly the other treble hook was embedded in my right index finger.  Ozzie tried to take off again, with my finger firmly attached to the lure which was still attached to his nose. 

Needless to say, he and I were in a total panic at that point.  My finger was bleeding, and I was screaming for someone to hang on to Ozzie.  Nate had gone to get Wayne, but I didn’t know where he was fishing and he hadn’t arrived yet.  There was a group of tourists on the nearby covered bridge.  What a show they got that day!  I was yelling things like, “Does anyone have a cell phone?!  Call 911!!!” because I was desperate to somehow remove a whole dog from being attached to my finger.  Well, someone did call 911,  and  then Katie arrived on the scene with the wire cutter.  Bekah was helping to hold Ozzie still (she ended up with my blood all over her legs), Katie was praying frantically out loud.  A man in the group of tourists came forward and quickly cut the hooks loose from the lure.  David says he doesn’t know how the man managed to cut through those steel hooks so quickly, because they are almost impossible to cut through with the kind of wire cutter we had.    I think God put those people there just at that time for us.  Ozzie and I still had hooks in us, but now we were no longer attached to the lure or to each other, so the main crisis had passed. 

This was about when Wayne got there-- just in time to see a whole bunch of hysterical people, fish hooks, blood...  The helpful tourist had mentioned that I should elevate my hand to help stop the bleeding.  I was in no condition to think of that myself, so I’m glad he did!  Later David reminded me not to look at my hand-- more excellent advice.

            So we left the poor tourists behind (I hope we thanked them profusely, I can’t imagine confronting an unknown frantic dog and an unknown  bleeding person and diving right in there to help.  God bless that man!)  We came back to the house to await our emergency help from the 911 call.  Wayne tried to cancel them, but they were already on their way.  Apparently once 911 is called, they must respond—you can’t cancel them.  The EMT’s or whoever they were, arrived, but they wouldn’t touch the dog, and didn’t want to work on me because the hook was too deep in my finger joint, so they left us to pursue help at human and animal ERs. 

            Wayne started making phone calls to try to find a vet to work on Ozzie on a Saturday night.  My next-door-neighbor-father-in-law, Rodney, took me to the Emergency Room.  The waiting room was packed, so we knew we were in for a long wait.  When we checked in and they saw the hook in my bloody finger, they wanted to wrap gauze around it so people wouldn’t have to see it in the waiting room.  I wouldn’t let them put gauze on it (it would get caught on the barbs of the protruding hooks for goodness sakes!), so the nurse left for a moment and came back with a styrofoam cup which she popped over my finger so that I wouldn’t gross anyone out while we waited!  Of course, I looked like a freak sitting there pointing up with a paper cup.  At least my finger was totally numb by this time, so it didn’t hurt during the long wait.  Thank God for that—swelling and nerve damage happens for a reason!  After about a 2 1/2 hour wait, Wayne’s cousin, a doctor in charge of the ER, extracted the hook from my finger, put me on antibiotics, and ordered a tetanus shot for me (it had been 30 years since my last one).

            Meanwhile Wayne ended up having to take Ozzie to a pet ER about 45 minutes from our house.  On the trip down, Wayne help Ozzie’s head up with one hand to make sure he didn’t get his hooks tangled in anything in the car. However,  in the waiting room there, while Wayne was filling out paperwork, Ozzie managed to get the barb protruding from his nose stuck in Wayne’s shoe lace, resulting in further trauma for himself (and for Wayne).  Wayne quickly pulled off his shoe and Ozzie was anchored to the spot by his nose.  Pictures of this whole event would now be priceless, but who thinks of that during a crisis?  They ended up putting Ozzie out to extract the hooks from his nose.  Other than being quite woozy for a while because of the anesthesia, he was fine.  Wayne got him home and came on into the emergency room just as they were working on my finger at 10 p.m.  By the way, they had to get out some kind of special heavy duty wire cutter to cut through my hook, confirming that it was amazing that the tourist could cut through anything with the little wire cutter we had.

See?  He's fine.

            The result is that Ozzie was just fine (you couldn’t even see any damage to his nose!), my finger was numb for a couple of months from nerve damage, and my arm was very sore from the tetanus shot.  Not too bad, considering what happened!  The “scene of the crime” by the covered bridge creeped me out for a few months afterward, but now the whole thing just makes a great family story.