Dang, that smarted!!

Over the years, I've seen and heard all of the warnings about taking precautions against being injected by a power washer. Yesterday, I managed to do it.

I was cleaning off the north side of our garage with my gas powered, 2300 psi unit. Some water must have hit the ignition, 'cause the engine stopped. Checked the gas, had plenty of gas. As ya'll probably know, they start easier with the trigger pulled on the wand so you're not pulling against the pump.

I held the wand in my left hand and pulled the starter cord with my right. The engine fired right up, and somehow the wand got away from me and hit the palm of my right hand at the base of the thumb. My hand was only about 6" from the end of the wand when I got hit. Dang, that hurt!

Tore up my hand some, but not too bad. My wife was there, and I managed to shut off the engine. I assumed any water that had been injected into the hand would drain back out through the wound, and apparently it began doing so.

I've had wounds worse than that, and patched them up and went on working, but since this was new to me, we decided to go the the ER at our local hospital to be on the safe side. At the ER, they were more concerned about infection and when was my last tetanus shot than anything else. Anyway, they gave me a tetanus shot, patched up my hand with anti-biotic ointment, and sent me on my way.

From comments the nurses in the ER made, apparently this isn't an uncommon occurance. They'd all seen it before. But, like any accident, all it takes is one wrong move or one unguarded moment.

Don't feel too bad, we've all done something like that to ourselves one way or another. I'll admit it's a much worse feeling when my mistake caused someone else to get hurt instead of me. Hope you are fullt recovered real soon.

Those things will get you. I had one spray my hand at an angle... Peeled a big layer of skin off, all those exposed nerves HURT !
Be thankful it was not diesel fuel or hydraulic oil..

I guess you are lucky that you didn't inject your hand with high pressure oil.

Got to be careful with those things. I took some hide off my wrist with one a couple of years ago.

Yeah, a guy around here got high pressure hydraulic oil in the leg when the line sprung a leak. Had a terrible time of it, nearly lost his leg a couple of times. I think he eventually recovered.

When one of my grand daughters was in High School, the cheer squad had a car wash to raise money for whatever. Well, the coach thought it would be a good idea to take a power washer to take care of anything that might need extra power. One of the girls thought it would be real funny to power wash my grand daughter. She spent a week in the hospital and still has 3 crisscross scars on her left side.