Blisters

I was working on a part last night and I had a small nut gripped in some needle nose pliers. I went to twist, and the pliers came off. I reached up with my other hand to steady them while I tried again. This time when they slipped off the nut they clamped on my thumb hard. It hurt like hell and I could see that I would soon have a blood blister. While the pain adrenaline was still pumping, I thought quick and bit off the tip of my thumb, just where the blister was starting to form. I knew that a normal wound wouldn’t hurt half as much as a blood blister, and might heal faster. I spat out the nubbin of skin and looked down at my thumb. It was bleeding a bit, and now the adrenaline was starting to wear off. I went to the first aid kit and got an antiseptic wipe and bandage and stuff… cleaned it up.

I started thinking about that guy who cut off his leg when it wastrapped under the boulder. When your body is put in extraordinary circumstances, it really is capable of doing things you wouldn’t think possible. When I woke up that morning I never thought I would be spitting out a piece of my thumb that evening. I can clearly remember the adrenaline pain rush… time slowing down so I could consider how to best deal with the injury… the pinched flesh slowly reddening in the creases left behind by the pliers… knowing that blood blisters form quickly and painfully and that I wouldn’t have much time before it would swell…. pulling my hand up to my lips, tasting the oil and dirt on my hand… feeling my teeth grip the small lump on my thumb and cleanly slicing through it with my incisors…. and then the metalic rush of blood. Then the crisis was over.

But what if it had lasted longer? What if I’d been stuck there with the rock on my leg, continuously in that slow moving zero-memory-moment with the focus so intense, but no time for recall? I can see myself pulling hard on the leg, but not getting it to give, tearing first at the flesh with my hands and fingernails, then mustering the mental energy to remember the knife. Remembering the knife is more difficult than using it. Using it is the natural part… the instinctual part. The part when we were foxes hunted and chewed off our own legs to prevent the hunter from getting more than a bite. The part when we were lizards and we let the birds take our tails so we could get away with our legs and innards. The part when we were starfish and let ourselves get cut and chewed and half eaten so we could regrow our missing limbs at a more opportune time.

And like that the leg is gone, just a lump of flesh under a rock. Scarcely identifiable. Like the small flake of skin that’s somewhere on the floor of the shop, dried up now, like a booger or dandruff. Discarded and unnecessary, having performed its job.

Then the tough part comes, because suddenly and without warning, perspective returns. The normal way that things were done is gone. For the thumb, it’s just getting used to typing with a bandaid on the finger. But a leg? The horror of what was committed finally begins to penetrate and you wish that you’d just pushed the rock off, that you’d found a piece of wood to lever it with or that a passerby had used his walkingstick to help you. But it’s not coming back. And that’s the painful part of the wound.