Brandy Steps on a Fish Bone

Brandy was having fun at the lake one day when she jumped hard onto a fish bone that happened to be pointing upward:

The bone went completely through her foot and came out the other side (but didn't poke all the way through the skin on the top side):

Fortunately, it didn't go through the pad part of her foot: only the thinner webbing. But the bone had a serated edge with backward-pointing spikes (see below), so I couldn't pull it out of her foot without hurting her. I had to carry her a half mile back to the car and drive her to the emergency clinic. What did they do? They just pulled it out. I could hear her yelp from the other side of the building. At least they bandaged her up well:

She healed quickly and was back out at the lake in no time. (Next time she would cut herself on a broken bottle though, resulting in stitches and three weeks of no swimming. We don't go to that lake anymore.)

It turns out that this bone was a catfish's pectoral spine. The backward-pointing barbs appear to be an evolutionary adaptation to deter predators like herons.