Shaving Cut, Remix

Given that just below my nose bled for over two hours this morning, despite having chapstick in my pocket, I'm going to disavow all the advice in that last post.  It went on despite twenty minutes of ice, twenty minutes of pressure several times, and the chapstick trick.  I hear Sank's recommendation about the styptic, but I suspect that wouldn't have done the trick either.  It went on so long I googled, "Is it possible to become a hemophiliac?"

Fortunately, that's not likely.  But I did find the potential root of the problem over on reddit.  There's a consensus that the number of blood vessels in the face, coupled with the lack of jagged edges on a small razor cut, inhibit clotting.

While reading through the thread, I got to this comment, "Yah it's actually a pretty common thing in equine medicine too. Horses have a tendency to injure themselves, especially the faces and especially the eyelids which get ripped off quite a bit. Every one of those bleeds like hell and makes you freak out that your patient/pet is going to die but isn't really all that severe (sans the last one)."

I thought, wtf.  I've never seen a horse with its eyelid ripped off.  But then my horse experience is limited to the horses at my grandmother's house, which included Goober, who later came to live at our house.  Fortunately, someone else had the same surprise and asked, to paraphrase, "wtf?"

The response: "It's not an every day occurrence but it's not exactly rare either. As for how it happens, it depends. They can catch it on a fence screw, or on the feed bucket, or a piece of barbed wire, or pretty much anything. Once it's caught the horse flips the fuck out (as they're prone to do) and then jerks their head away, thus ripping off the eye lid.  That's one of the reasons it's always a good idea to train your horse NOT to freak out whenever it's bound up (as much as possible). That and them walking through barbed wire that's gotten blown down/knocked down. If you teach your horse to be OK with having stuff wrapped around its legs (kind of like sacking-out), then it won't jerk away from the barbed wire (thus digging it deeper into their flesh), but rather stay put (since trying to walk off would be painful) until you can help.

Which led to my favorite question, "O.o how do they survive in the wild?"

Which of course had a very cogent answer, "To be fair in the wild there aren't feed buckets and barbed wire."

Touche'.

This was backed up by a picture of a horse with a ripped eyelid.  I know...I didn't warn you, it's gross, and it probably isn't what you were expecting at the end of a post about shaving cuts.  But now you know not to panic horses unless you're a mean fucker, and why they don't have their own haunted houses at Halloween.