Last summer I had an interesting experience at my friend’s birthday party. Ps: If blood and feet aren’t your thing, this might be a strange read. If blood and feet IS your thing, then you need to seek professional help immediately. Below you will find a how-to guide on taking attention away from anyone celebrating their birthday.

It was the 17th of August 2025 and I had been invited to a birthday party on an island in the fjord. I came directly from a reunion with two of my closest childhood friends, so I had a lot of stuff with me. I really like the birthday girl, as well as her psychologist boyfriend and all her weird friends that are in need of psychologists. The sun was shining. The water glistening and warm. It was one of the last days of true summer. A perfect day!

At some point about half of the party decided to get into the ocean. I had already gone for a swim earlier to collect alcohol that was floating away. I had the brilliant idea to “cool down the beer in the ocean”, it worked perfectly until the beer escaped their constraints and tried to pull a “Wilson” on me. Anyways, most of the guests take the ladder down into the sea but I chose to enter from the beach. There’s only one itsy bitsy problem.

Time for a history lesson. In the 1960s Europe decides to import the pacific oyster for farming purposes, as the native oysters kept dying to disease. The female of this species produce millions of eggs every year, and their larva can float for weeks before attaching to become shells. Some of these lil buggers escaped their farms and traveled further every year, eventually finding their way to the Oslo fjord, where they’re thriving more than I have done in a long time.

Back to the story. I carefully make my way towards the ocean. There’s shells on the way there, I can feel them. But I also see my friends enjoying the water so I press on! Further in, where I can’t see the ground, I slowly put my left foot down I feel the sharp shells underneath it, so I take a leap of faith and move my feet further out, hoping to land on a an area without shells. A leap of faith not unlike pressing a random square in minesweeper. This wasn’t the best move, as I landed on more shells and this time the weight of my body pressed my feet down on them. It was painful but I moved on, and from that point I could safely swim to the others.

I think we swam for 15-20 minutes. In the ocean the psychologist introduced me to a veterinarian that was super cool. The fact that I had gotten waterboarded (voluntarily) came up, as well as some other chaotic experiences. “So what’s next” she asked me, with that context. LITTLE DID WE KNOW..!!!

The oyster I stepped on cut me so deep that it severed an artery at the base of my big toe. Arterial bleeding is serious stuff, blood was spurting out in sync with my pulse. It was a most fascinating experience, and everyone seemed excited to be a part of it! It looked SO PAINFUL but I didn’t feel much at all. I think I also cut whatever connected pain to that region with the same oyster. The blood was so bright red that someone pointed out how fake it looked. I wonder how much blood I lost in the ocean before I realized I was bleeding. Certainly enough to prove that sharks aren’t a big threat in these waters..

I was very lucky to have a veterinarian present, whom also had a father who worked as a doctor. She knew what to do and how to do it. Got the wound cleaned up. Some of my friends at the party went door to door in the nearby houses looking for bandages we could borrow, and luckily for them the second house had a doctor who gave us some. Now I was all patched up and ready to continue the party. As I was finishing my beer it did dawn on me that maybe I should get to the ER, maybe that’s the responsible thing to do. The group made a plan on how to do that. Someone with a car offered to drive me and my girlfriend there and I graciously accepted. I did plan to be back and continue the party later, but uh, that was a bit optimistic. A huge thank you to everyone that helped me out that day! ❤

At the ER I was marked as a mildishly important emergency patient. Not the highest priority, but important enough that they advised me to stay the night unless I wanted permanent consequences from the wound. My girlfriend was sleepy so I sent her home, it was going to be a long night at the ER. It’s actually a fun room to sit in because people watching becomes way more interesting here. Trying to figure out what caused the people around you to end up here. “What happened to the cute girl with her arm in a sling, or what about the guy who’s limping around?”

One thing that was clear to me is that none of these silly, silly people came prepared for an overnight stay at the emergency room. Such lack of foresight… They all required phone chargers, and I had with me every type of charger under the sun! First the cute girl asks to borrow one, then the limping guy, and then a guy in a wheelchair! By the time I was called in for my medical procedure at 2am I had helped at least 5 people charge their phones. It was almost comical how they kept showing up. Note to self: Big entrepreneurial opportunity to sell chargers and power banks in the ER.

This was the second of three trips to the ER in the span of half a year. The one prior to this one, my girlfriend brought me here when I was in a suicidal state. But that is a story for another time, one I’ll eventually share here. The last time I went to the ER, it went there with someone very dear to me, shortly after they had gotten raped. That isn’t a story I will share on this blog. Ok back to the foot.

Apparently they see oyster cuts all the time. Every day some new fool stumbles into the hospital with a cut they have to deal with. They cleaned my feet meticulously, even took an x-ray to look for hidden oyster fragments that broke off inside of me. I got the most painful injection of local anesthesia I have ever received directly into the wound. And then it got stitched together with some blue string.

With everything patched up I probably receive some instructions on how not to undo everything they’ve done. To rest and all that jazz. I leave the hospital at 4:30, limping my way towards the first boat home to Nesodden.

So yeah that’s about it. Definitely suffered some nerve damage, the toe doesn’t feel the way it used to do before the cut. But overall, a great experience! Most of the time when people say that they want to show you their arterial bleeding, it’s a bad thing. But I hope you, the reader, found this to be delightful.

Ps: I have learned that you can crush the oyster shells and turn them into pigment for painting. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the concept of a plan!