Fishing line stayed in finger 36 years

 John Attanasio of Kalispell was plagued by an odd jabbing sensation in the middle finger of his right hand for years — but he finally figured it out.

“I get a sharp pain, like somebody’s poking me with a needle. Anything I grab, I’d occasionally get this sharp pain. It’s been bothering me for at least 10 years,” he said.

The 45-year-old Attanasio was playing a video game late one recent night when the sensation returned. 

“My finger was getting really sore and I looked at it up in the light and I saw like a  pimple getting ready to pop,” Attanasio said.

He grabbed some tweezers and a jeweler’s loupe to magnify the situation and commenced on some minor surgery on himself. He ended up locating the source of his pain.

“I thought, my gosh, there’s a shard of glass under my skin,” he said. “As I pulled on it, it came sliding out of my finger and it’s a half inch long ... I sat there for 10 minutes and I thought about where did I get this thing.”

Then it came to him: 36 years ago, when he was 9 years old, Attanasio got a fish hook in the same finger. 

He was hooked so badly that his father took him to the hospital emergency room. The doctor ended up pulling the hook all the way through, in a direction avoiding the barb.

The “shard of glass” was actually a piece of filament fishing line that got left behind in his finger.

For Attanasio, an avid angler who occasionally has tossed aside pieces of fishing line in the field, there is a lesson to be learned. 

“I’ll never throw any away again,” he said. “If it laid in my body for 36 years like that and it didn’t break down, what does it do in the lakes and rivers and streams? So I will never throw it away again. I’ll retrieve it if I can now, because that stuff never goes away.”

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.