A young Dundee pharmacy worker has spoken of her shock after she sliced her hand open on a blade hidden in a park bench.
Key worker Gemma Callander, 20, has had to be vaccinated for Hepatitis B after slashing open her fingers on a fragments of a craft knife blade hammered into the bench near the city’s Happyhillock Shopping Centre.
She said: “I don’t know how someone could do such a thing during this awful time.
“I went to sweep down the bench after eating my lunch. I didn’t even see it. It sliced my fingers open.”
She said the wound, covering three fingers on her left hand, was not immediately painful.
“I thought what has just happened and then I looked down at my fingers.”
The blade fragment had been inserted into a bench close to a park area outside the shopping centre, she said.
Gemma chanced on it during a lunch break from a busy shift in the Boots branch inside the shopping centre.
“I don’t know how someone could do that, especially in a place where kids play. I’ve seen children climbing on the bench where it happened.”
Her colleagues helped her to the accident and emergency at Ninewells Hospital where she had to wait alone due to coronavirus restrictions.
She is now at home recovering after receiving paper stitches, bandages and the first of three vaccinations against Hepatitis B.
“I’m off work until the fingers heal up. I can’t do my job one handed.”
Her dad returned to the bench to deal with the blade after Gemma had received medical attention.
“He hammered it out of the bench for me. It was metal. It looked like pieces of a Stanley blade knife.”
The locum pharmacy advisor had not worked in in the Happyhillock Shopping Centre before the incident, but she said she was not going to let it put her off her job.
“I’m healing fine. I keeping forgetting I have done it and going to do something and then it is sore.
“I would work in that branch again without worrying about it.”
