I have had nightmares of things like that. Yours can true, OUCHIES!!!. I feel your pain....sort of. I had a spine from my E.grusonii go right under my thumb nail, between the nail and skin. I could see the spine under my nail about half way up. OMG, you wanna talk about pain...intense pain!

Dawn

Man, I share your pain. The weather forcasters sure do get discombobulated.. I just play it by ear, and hope for the best.
Twice recently, after hearing thunder, I rushed out at night only to find it already raining..
BB in SC

Last week it was cold in Michigan, this week its in the eightys.cant figure it out. But would rather be safe than sorry. All my plants are inside.

Ooh sorry to hear about your injuries. That one under the thumb makes me cringe! I get scratched my columnar Euphorbias all the time...that's about the worst for me.

Weather! My plants stay outside year round but last winter with all our rain I was constantly running in and out putting up the tarp canopy and then taking it down when the sun came out. This got REALLY old so this year I bought a "special" canopy. It's clear! So now I can just leave it up all winter and not worry about my plants not getting enough sun. Good luck to all of you with the impending wet/cold season!

Well CactiJoe, they're no different down here in Tas. They're too often wrong to take notice of them, and too right to ignore them.
BTW sorry about your foot, hope it's much better now.

Cheers, CP

Once you get ALL of the spines out, (and thank God the skin on the bottom of our feet is thicker) there really isn't much pain. Maybe a couple days. The weird thing is that the spines that you see that appear whitish or flat brownish are quite colorful once they are in your flesh just like when they first are born at the tip top of the column. I really feel for our cactophile who got the razor sharp E. grusonnii under the nail. YEEEEEEOOOOWWWWW!!!! Kind of like the bamboo torture they used on POW's in SE Asia.

Reading this made me cringe!
Its bad enough getting a Opuntia glochid in my thumb or a Notocactus spine in my finger(leninghausii looks so innocent and soft, yea right!)