A freak accident sent a woman to a hospital Wednesday after a nail impaled one of her fingers at her northern Butler County home.

The woman, 18, handled her predicament “probably better than a lot of people would have,” said Steve Bickel, chief of the Harrisville Volunteer Fire Department.

Firefighters were called around 8:30 a.m. to a home on South Main Street in Harrisville to assist a Superior Ambulance crew in helping the woman.

Bickel said she apparently had slipped and fallen on the ice, and gotten the pinky finger on her left hand skewered by a standard 16-penny nail on a landscape timber along a sidewalk edge.

Fire crews used a pry bar tool in the rescue, removing most of the timber around the nail.

“She was conscious and alert the whole time,” Bickel said, but a little “sore.”

She was taken by ambulance “with the nail still in her finger,” he said, “so they could take it out at (Grove City Medical Center).” Her condition was not known.