In response to yesterday's feature Glue the wound, skip the stitches, a few cringe-inducing anecdotes from chefs, culled from the comments.

As 30-year kitchen veteran, The People's Chef wrote, quoting Jesse Ventura, "It's not a macho thing at all...I ain't got time to bleed."

A round of shots for the kitchen, please!

When you're in the weeds, you have no time to get stitches. You're already pissed at yourself for getting cut, so you just want to get back on the line and keep cooking. My old chef used to joke (i hope he was joking) that whenever he cut himself, he'd just sear the wound on the flattop, cauterizing, and go back to work. Sure, a lot of it is about machismo, but really it comes from not wanting to let the customers, or more importantly, the other kitchen staff down. If I'm gone to get stitches, they're screwed. - Gastrodude

Currently a line cook at a popular neighborhood bistro in Chicago...I can say I will have no hesitation to cauterize a cut with a non-stick or a knife held over the flame. Compared to oil or sugar burns, contact burns don't hurt at all. - Glenn

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"It's a good thing you came in; the meat was hanging out."

There's no context in which those words portend well - especially not when they're uttered by a medical professional. In this instance, a physician assistant was snipping off the ninth and final stitch she'd sewn into my lidocaine-numbed index finger*, sliced nearly in two by a tumbler I was using to measure cocktail ingredients this past Saturday. Suddenly I felt like a dope for even having thought of toughing out this injury at home.
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Sharp blades, high flames, scalding oil - nope, it's not the next installment of the Saw film franchise; it's your kitchen. And it wants to kill you.

Our recent post about a cooking-related cleavage burn* and call for injury stories garnered some shudder-inducing accounts of band saw gouges, knife-gouged feet and the telltale burn mark that lets you pick a professional chef out of a crowd. Mitt up and read on.

Mind your mandoline

Patrick in Birmingham
A few months ago, I was using our new mandoline slicer. Every thing was going so well, until I felt myself "nick" the top of my finger (important note: I was NOT using the guard). Upon closer inspection, I realized that I had not nicked but rather sliced off about half of my fingernail! After I almost passed out, we headed out to the emergency department but not before tossing the mandoline in the trash.

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I burned my cleavage with a meat thermometer. How was your weekend?

The stem was heated to roughly 435F, though it may have dropped a few degrees in its mid-air bobble from the grill, to my mitted fingers, down the front of my black cotton dress. "Thank goodness..." my brain stuttered in the milliseconds between the metal's contact with the moon-pale skin adjacent to my right breast and the initial ascent of pain from nerve endings to thalamus, "...that I wore a bra today."
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