Could've Been A Lot Worse

I woke up in the middle of the night.  It was completely dark and I was disoriented, so I started to grope my way around and ended up running into a sculpture (yes, I've got sculpture pieces in my bedroom -- I really need a bigger place), fell and banged my forehead against furniture.

At that, I suppose I should be grateful that it wasn't my nose or (heaven forfend!) my eye.

Which reminds me, my friend Evelyn (rest in peace, friend) once said something about me losing an eye somehow (don't remember what started that macabre line of thought) and going around wearing a cool black eye patch like a pirate.  I said that would be cool, except for the fact that I would then be living in constant dread of losing the other one, too (that's what actually happened to a blind singer in Korea:  he was born with perfectly normal eyes, but as a child he lost an eye in an accident, then a few years later he lost the other eye in a separate accident -- talk about misfortunate).

Now I've got a night light.

I Must Have Been Really Pissed off

to have done this to my hand.  Most likely I punched a wall in anger/frustration.

Luckily though, nothing seems to have been broken.  Supposedly it happened in 2022, but as is so often the case with these things, I have no memory at all of this injury or what led up to it.

Related post:  Speaking Of Knives

Speaking Of Knives

A few days ago I suddenly felt an itch in my left forefinger.  I absently scratched it, then realized there was a small cut, looking as if it had been made by a knife or razor.

I had no idea of how it came to be, though.  Actually, this sort of thing happens to me fairly often;  I may be a physical coward who tries to avoid taking risks unnecessarily, but it so happens I'm also a klutz, and I'm always bumping into things and knocking things over, so casual minor damage is not unexpected.

Here is a photo of a somewhat more serious-looking cut in the very same place(weird!), from a few years ago;  it looks rather gruesome, and you would be forgiven for thinking I would remember an incident like that -- but no, I have no memory at all of that cut, either.

Kind of odd, in light of the fact that I still well remember the incident from my fifth or sixth year, when someone spilled hot porridge over my foot, tried to wipe it off, and peeled the scalded -- cooked! -- skin right off my foot!  I ended up being carried to the nearby emergency room for treatment. 

EDIT:  While re-reading this post much later I remembered that this incident was actually the third time I was injured in the same spot (in fact, you can see the aftermath of the first cut in the top photo;  I don't know why I didn't recall the incident before).  Years ago, during a period when my mother was weak from illness and couldn't get about much on her own I got her a wheelchair.  On one occasion, having helped mom into the passenger seat of the car I was loading the folded-up wheelchair in the back, and somehow I managed to get the same finger caught on something and tore open a triangular flap of skin.  It didn't come off completely, but instead had opened up like a hinge or a page in a tiny book.

I gingely put the flap of skin back like a boxtop, wrapped it up in some tissue and drove mom home.  Surprisingly, there was little pain.  It healed with little to show for it, except the edge of the cut is now slightly thicker than the surrounding tissue.  Is third time really the charm?  In any case, I'm going to have to exercise extra caution with the finger.

A Somewhat Unusual Evening

I hadn't eaten all day and as afternoon wore on into evening I felt I "should" eat.  So I set out on foot for the restaurant row by the subway station.  While on my way there though, my attention was diverted by the sight of the waxing-gibbous Moon, and I took a bunch of shots.  And by the time I got to my intended destination I found I wasn't hungry after all.  I came back home, had a few cookies and a beer a little while later, and that was it.

Oh, and I tripped and fell on the way back.  It was just a "light" fall, and all that happened was bruised knees and a scraped palm, but what the heck, I haven't fallen in many many years.  In fact, the last time I remember falling was back in October, 2015, when I fell off my kickboard, faceplanted the sidewalk and broke a tooth.

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.