My left pinky finger has been handi for more or less ten years now. Sounds weird? Not so. Handi would be short for handi-not-capable in my case. Back in the day, in the midst of a creative spurt, I tried to split a jumbo straw for some art I was creating. I placed the jumbo straw in my left palm, gripping it tightly as I tried to force a knife into the straw to cut it length-wise. To my surprise, and I should have seen it coming really, the knife easily cut the straw and my pinky finger along with it. Shocked, I opened my hand only to see something I expected even less: the opponens digiti quinti, in short, the bone.
I ran upstairs to tell my sister I cut myself “taking the knife out of the dishwasher” and I did what our cumulative minds thought was best, I placed my pinky under cold running water until she could solve the bandage situation. Twenty minutes later, she emerged with peroxide and forty pounds of gauze in hand. I should have taken pictures then because she did the best mummification on a live human I’ve ever seen and wrapped my poor digit in the forty pounds of gauze. The bandage job was so good in fact that I didn't feel the need to trek to the doctors.
Skip ahead a couple years when I realize that I’m no longer able to bend the end bit of said finger (flexor digitorum profundus). I accepted the consequences of my momentary stupidity until a doctor said it could be fixed. I made an appointment with a hand specialist who was a little too excited to hear about my case. He said my finger-bending ability could possibly be repaired. However, since the cut ligament causing the handicap shrinks when unused, there was no way of knowing how much it had shrunk. He would have to perform an invasive surgery, cutting from mid-pinky in a small zig-zag pattern and extending the disfiguring and increasingly large pattern down my forearm. (As shown here if you strain your eyes and look at one of the superimposed photos.)
I immediately refused the procedure after the doctor explained he had never done such a thing and would be happy to do the explorative surgery. Another option was to forge the joint in a permanently bent position to stop my tip from extending back. Oh, oops! Did I leave that out? Since no ligament is attached to my fingertip, I’m unable to bend the tip of the finger, but there’s also nothing holding it from bending backwards. Now you understand how much of a freak show this is? Back to the point, I didn’t like the idea of my finger being more susceptible to breaking by having a stiff and forged joint (no pun intended), and I also refused this procedure.
Once again, I accepted my fate and lived on to see the disgusted looks on people’s faces as I showed them my very own conversation piece of art. It’s been a long and harrowing road of freakdom, but alas I managed to get through it, using it to my advantage. (My longtime high school art teacher took 10% off my project mark for drawing my hand with a demented finger, but later gave me a perfect score when I showed him how close to reality my drawing had been.)
Spring forward to this morning, when I considered amputating my finger after seeing this on gizmodo:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/pull-my-digit/video-of-artificial-finger-shows-its-neither-digital-nor-made-of-chicken-268412.php (it’s worth the jump, but come back here, YOU!)
Problem solved? Possibly, but is it better to have a mechanical blue finger covered in fake skin or one that doesn’t bend at all but has a nail perfect for painting? Let’s just say I’m sitting here re-reading my post as I apply vampy red polish to all my ten digits.
