Life and Limb
Last week, I cut a deep gash in my finger with a knife. As my life flashed before my eyes, I pictured life without a middle finger, but it was quite embarrassing when my doctor assessed it as a trivial wound — no stitches necessary. I was patched up with a couple of steri-strips and some gauze, and was told to have it checked in a week’s time.
Last night I took the gauze off to examine my newly healed finger, and I discovered to my horror that I had lost feeling at the fingertip. The Internet is full of horror stories of people permanently severing nerves in their fingers, so I returned to the doctor the next morning to see what could be done. I was reassured that the problem was temporary, and that I should regain feeling within a few months.
A few months is not a trivial amount of time. It means that, for the first time in my life, I’m now dealing with a long term injury. As far as injuries go, this is about as minor as it could possibly get, so I feel blessed to be introduced gently. A drunkard would say, “Better to feel nothing than to feel pain.”
I’m a healthy, young, active guy, and the thought of living day-to-day with pain, or disability is utterly foreign to me. As such, I find it incredibly easy to forget what I have going for me, or that my situation will inexorably change with age and luck.
We don’t tend to like thinking about our health when everything is OK. It’s a scary, unpleasant thought that we can ignore in favor of more exciting things. It’s only when we lose our health that it becomes a big deal, and then it’s not afraid to remind us that we haven’t been paying attention for a while.
With luck, six months from now I’ll glance at my finger and forget that anything ever happened to it. A small part of me, however, hopes that the feeling doesn’t return. There’s nothing like a numb middle finger to gently remind you that you still have nine healthy ones.
