LPT: If you are injured and haven’t gotten around to seeing a doctor, don’t wait to take out the stitches and let it heal.

I wacked my hand with a impact gun at work to the point where it was twitching and bleeding. I stitched it myself (not recommended) and I felt fine after taking the bandage off. I didn’t want to waste a day off of work to go to the doctor, so I decided to give it a few more days. This last night it was very painful and I noticed it was already healed shut while it still had the stitches, so I removed them and found that it was infection. With the stitches still in the skin, it did not allow my hand to heal properly and it even started to rot in areas. I am now out a day of work and lost thousands of dollars for the ER and doctor visit. I am not sure how common this is with home stitched injuries but I thought I would share. Thank you for reading this.<br><br>Edit: Holy crap this blew up. I’m glad that this can be a helpful story for some people. Please don’t try to stitch yourself. This happened to me back in January and I’m still recovering. I had to go through physical therapy and was out of work for almost 3 months. I’m still in pain and loosing feeling in parts of my hand. My advice is to just take care of yourself the first time and continue taking care of your injury.<br><br>Edit 2: I have read a few comments saying that I should not be sharing my story because I stitched myself. While I do not recommend stitching yourself, accidents do happen. I didn’t think I needed to go to the ER at first after the incident, but still wanted to close the wound. I have had good luck in the past stitching myself and I didn’t think this would have been any different. I hope that my story can still reach people that don’t think their injury is bad enough to get checked out and hopefully prevent this kind of thing from happening.