Oops! Important Safety Tip

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Cosmoline

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I was cleaning my firearms last weekend and did some detail cleanup inside my revolver with q-tips. Well some of the caustic q-tips got mixed back in with the clean ones and I ended up cleaning out my right ear with one of them. THe chemicals must have burned the inside of my ear, which wasn't the worst part. I cleaned them out pretty quickly. The bad part is a truly brutal infection set in last week and the entire right side of my head and ear puffed up. I'm now on antibiotics and in a surprising amount of intense pain.

Watch those q-tips! :D
 
Dude, what are you using to clean stuff with, HCl or something? I've gotten plenty of Gun Scrubber and CLP in open wounds and I've never had anything happen like you describe. I guess you're gifted or something :uhoh: :neener:
 
I remember learning that "you shouldn't stick anything in your ewar smaller than your elbow".
 
I picked up a habit from my wife that will avoid this. My wife is an OR Nurse. When she does a task like gun cleaning, she works from right to left. Clean supplies are on the right, the dirty pile is on the left, the work is in the middle. I've developed the same habit. everything moves from right to left and nothing gets "contaminated."

Hope your ear is better.
 
I have separate stocks for cleaning guns and cleaning people. Gun cleaning supplies are keep on the bench in the utility room. People cleaning supplies are in the bathroom. I never go to one for the other purpose.
 
I keep my supplies organized and only pull enough clean to use, then discard. There's no dirty pile left over to make mistakes with, except for my wipe cloth and that's *really* identifiable.
 
Cosmoline said:
caustic q-tips
Click to expand...
I've gotta echo LiquidTension's question - what are you using?? I wouldn't want to use anything which is actually caustic on a gun. Most of the chemicals are strong to very strong solvents, but not caustic.

On the other hand, there's no telling what can happen to the soft tissue (eyes, ears, etc.) when a solvent remains on it for while.
 
Damn! That hurts just reading about it; I've had an ear infection just once, and never hope to again....

I clean me in the bathroom; I clean my guns in the shop, or in olden days, on the coffee table--but in either case, when I'm done, all the cleaning disposables--Q-tips, paper towels, cleaning patches--they get tossed 'dirty' or not. I only pull down what I need, it's not like I'm chucking out a whole extra wad of clean cleaning patches, etc., like, baby with the bath water...
 
You might be a gun nut if:

You once tried to clean out your ears with Hoppes #9.
 
Generally, Q-tips or cotton swaps should be considered "clean" and never put back in the container they came out of even if you didn't use them. That might eliminate that risk aside from just buying a separate set of Q-tips for guns. They are pretty cheap. :)
 
This is why I buy my cotton swabs for gun cleaning from Brownell's (or Radio Shack in a pinch). They have wooden sticks and cotton on one end only. Hard to mistake for my run of the mill Q-Tip in the bathroom.

Greg
 
Since my wife is prone to ear infections I know they can very painful. I asked her if she might be using the Q-tips I cleaned my guns with. Got called a name that can't be repeated here. I am going to warn all my friends about this problem though. :D
 
I'm not completely sure what was on the offending q-tip. It couldn't have been CLP or regular oil. I suspect it was something like a degreasing agent that I had used earlier to clean off a front sight in prep. for paint. One of those might have been mixed in the box and APPEARED clean since all it had on it was colorless degreaser. That stuff can be pretty nasty--like paint thinner. Whatever it was it had enough punch to irritate the lining of my ear. After discussion with my MD, it appears my own efforts to clean it out with more q-tips soaked in water probably made the situation worse by spreading it around and scraping more tissue off.

At any rate, the antibiotics have finally kicked in and I can hear out of my right ear again. But for awhile my head was so infected that the swollen tissues were actually pushing my lower jaw out of place, making it very difficult to eat.
 
dude!!! like, heres what you should do. take a small ziploc baggie, fill it up with your guncleaning qtips, and keep it seperate from the earcleaning qtips.

operative word being seperate. :D
btw, how'd you explain that to the doctor?
 
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