Thumbs

Miki (our rambuctious little field spaniel puppy) and I were just playing in our living room. He decided that my right thumb was a chew toy, and those little puppy teeth are sharp! Before I could extract my thumb from his mouth (actually it was partway down his throat!), those little razors he calls teeth had raked a couple of nasty gashes down the length of my thumb.

I washed them out and discovered that if I carefully held my thumb perfectly straight, the blood didn’t gush out quite so badly. In fact, with just a bit of pressure for a couple of minutes, the bleeding stopped altogether. This meant that I could safely leave the kitchen sink and head for the bathroom, where I knew we kept a package of bandages. Debbie was out grocery shopping, so I was on my own.

Here’s where the challenge was: I had to get three bandages (to cover the length of the two cuts) out of the box, out of their paper wrapper, and remove the little papers that cover the sticky part — all without bending my thumb and starting the gusher all over again. Does that sound easy to you? Or at least feasible? Trust me: it is not easy…and in fact I could not do it at all. I eventually gave up trying, and just bent my thumb to get the job done and let the blood run into the bathroom sink. Once I had three bandages lying sticky-side-up on the counter, I straightened my thumb, reapplied pressure, and stopped the gusher again. Then I was able to put the bandages on with just my left hand; that wasn’t too hard.

It’s amazing how dependent we are on such a simple little thing like a thumb bending…

I remember another similar revelation about thirty years ago. This was a much more impactful situation: I had broken my right wrist rather badly, and I had a cast (the old-fashioned plaster kind) from my shoulder to my hand, with only about half my fingers protruding. The cast was strapped such that my forearm was held against my chest. I’m right-handed, so the only hand I could use for the eight weeks I was in a cast was my left hand. Everything was more difficult, even simple little things you’d never imagine, like opening a door (or a hatch on the ship I was stationed on; I was in the U.S. Navy at the time). Driving my stick-shift car was only possible when I rigged up a shift lever extension (a buddy welded it up for me) that let me use my left hand to shift — and I had to let go of the steering wheel to do that. Taking a shower was really challenging. For me the worst of all was trying to do my job (as an electronic technician): trying to use tools like soldering irons or pliers with my left hand was unbearably awkward and totally frustrating.

Not being able to bend my right thumb is much less of a problem, not least because within a day or so it will have healed enough to use again. But it sure is a reminder of all the human characteristics that we just take for granted, day in and day out…