Quick shout-out question: embedded graphite splinter

[bktheirregular]

So kid brother comes home from class, and it turns out that he managed to jam a pencil into his hand by accident, and a sliver of the graphite core broke off and lodged deep in the fleshy part of his thumb's lowest joint.

Lacking a very fine set of tweezers, is there some sort of folk remedy for this? Or is it just safer to leave the graphite sliver be? (It's in there fairly deep; can be seen as a black mark on the flesh.)

Pencil graphite's not poisonous, is it?

Comments

(frozen) Ow!

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Pencil graphite's not poisonous, is it?

Hope not. I still have a little black dot on each shin from pencil leads that broke off there when I was 8. (Long story. Suffice it to say zoos should not sell already-sharpened pencils in their gift shops, and accident-prone little girls should not carry them in mesh-sided bookbags.)

In all seriousness, I have no idea how to get it out -- tweezers like one would use for a wood splinter seem likely to just break it up. If it's close enough to the surface, the old wives' trick of sliding a (sterilized) sewing needle under the top layers of skin to open up space for the sliver to move might do it.

The good new is, if you can't get it out, it's pretty much just carbon. Our entire chemical makeup is based on it. :-)