Doc Shares Horrific Photos of Guy Who Tried to Open Beer with a Chopstick

“Bottle openers embodying my present invention are specially adapted for the removal of hard metal sealing caps from bottles having locking shoulders to which the caps have been so firmly applied as to require considerable force for effecting their detachment,” Irish-born inventor William Painter wrote in his patent application for a Capped Bottle Opener. He filed the paperwork in mid-1893, and by February of the following year, he was the proud owner of U.S. Patent No. 500,200 for a bottle opener that looks pretty similar to what we’ve all stashed in our kitchen drawers.

There have been variations and improvements on Painter’s invention, but bottle openers have existed as a real-life thing for 125 years, which is why no one, under any circumstances, should use a goddamn chopstick to try to open their beer. But because social media also exists, people keep trying to do that very thing, and some of those same people have had to immediately go to the hospital to have chopsticks pulled out of their palms.

According to the Daily Mail, a clip of Robby Cheung, the owner of Tung Po Kitchen in Hong Kong, recently went viral on a Chinese social media platform. In the video, Cheung angles the tip of a chopstick under a bottle cap and slaps the opposite end with his hand, which is admittedly an impressive way to open a beer. But in real life, people tend to be far less coordinated, especially when they’re already several drinks in.

Dr. Xiong Zhenfei, a hand and foot surgeon at Xiaoshan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China’s Zhejiang province, recently shared some pictures of how this trick can go wrong, and they are HORRIFYING. The photos—which are extremely graphic—show the tip of a chopstick protruding from a man’s hand, stretching the skin into an awful-looking point.

“He looked pretty calm, probably because he had had too much to drink and was numbed by the alcohol,” Dr. Xiong said. "The chopstick was about two centimeters deep in his palm and was bulging on the back of his hand. He said it hurt a lot and wanted me to pull it out. I asked how it happened, and he said he tried to show off by opening his third beer with a chopstick.”

The doc spent 30 minutes removing the chopstick from the unnamed patient’s hand (and hopefully another 30 minutes sighing deeply and shaking his head). The man told Dr. Xiong that his fingers had gone numb, which could signify that he’d wrecked some nerves. "I was supposed to cut his palm open to check for nerve damage, but he refused and left the following morning,” Xiong said. “So it's hard to say whether he will suffer any long-term effects from the injury."

Xiong said that, during one recent two-week period, he treated five men for the same injury, some misfortune and poor judgement that he attributed in part to a period of nice weather. “[T]hey were all having meals outside and drinking cold beers,” he said.

This isn’t a brand-new phenomenon though: Five months ago, someone posted a video on r/WhatCouldGoWrong of what we hope is a different man spearing himself with a chopstick.

“AAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!,” one commenter wrote. Exactly.