Ladybug On My Thumb

Rather an uncharacteristically cute & cheery photo from Sam today^.

BTW, that nail that looks oddly overgrown off the side, isn't really overgrown. It's actually the opposite -- the nail looks too large because a chunk of my thumb is gone from that side, the part that would normally be above the ladybug; I accidentally sliced it off with a matte knife in sculpture class a long time ago. The cut just missed the base of the nail, so it still grows full-size even though now there is no flesh under the inner edge of the last joint (of course this post wasn't going to be ALL cute & cheery^).

Oddly, I don't remember much pain. Maybe that's because John, my sculpture professor, who was a big burly guy, was holding the base of my thumb tight to stanch the blood as he walked me across campus to the infirmary.

Once we got there, the doctor checked out the wound and sent John right back with a cup of saline solution to fetch the cut-off piece of thumb, while I tried to remain philosophical about the fact that I'd just seen a small portion of my own living skeleton.

John came back presently with the piece of flesh. Despite the fairly messy state of the sculpture studio the task had taken hardly any time at all, as he'd got the other students to help him look for it. One of the girls found it and picked it up using two pieces of wood as makeshift chopsticks, he told me.

Then the doctor set to work; he cleaned the flesh, scraped out the subcutaneous fat and whatnot, and sewed it back onto my thumb to serve as a kind of ready-made bandage -- he actually burned tiny holes in the nail to pass the sutures through. Of course, with so much of the inner padding gone, it was essentially just a piece of skin and did not do anything to restore the original shape of my thumb; the side of the digit therefore remained flat, and looked rather mechanical with its nearly triangular tip.

Over the following days the piece of skin dried out and hardened, darkening until it was nearly black (I attributed that to the dried blood on the inside, not gangrene -- gangrene would have been bad).

Finally, after ten days the stitches came out, followed by a small amount of pus (ew-www^), for which I was given antibiotics. The dead skin was allowed to slough off naturally and I began the long wait for some of the meat to fill back in. That never happened to any meaningful extent, however. Even though the tip of the thumb rounded out some and after a long time the ache finally went away for good, to this day my left thumb remains significantly pointier than my right thumb.