And then I looked at my hand. And then I fainted. (Patreon)

When I was about eighteen years old, I fell off my roof. Normally I climbed the fence to escape to my safe, beautiful sunny spot, but this time my cousin was visiting and I thought it would be safer for us to use the ladder, since she didn’t have practice scaling the fence the way I did. Unfortunately, I didn’t have practice using the extending ladder, so I didn’t know to check that the latches were locked in place to keep it from sliding back into itself for convenient compact storage.

We went up and down a couple times, bringing our picnic up where we could enjoy the view of the trees and lake, leaving the ground-dwellers in our shadow. It was the third time I was descending with my cousin holding the bottom of the ladder stable that the partially secured latch gave out under my weight. I can’t catch a set of keys when they’re tossed to me but on instinct I grabbed the edge of the roof with my dominant hand which would have been amazing if the curb of it hadn’t been lined with strips of thin sheet metal called “flashing”. My weight pulled off one end of the flashing and I then fell straight down to the ground- still holding on to that metal strip with a death grip. 

My cousin shrieked “Are you ok?!” and I was amazed to tell her “Yes!” Somehow I had fallen so that the impact rolled through my body without breaking anything and I was shockingly pain-free. And then I looked at my hand. 

And then I fainted.

Here is the thing about severing the tendon in the pinky finger of your drawing hand, along with just a shit-ton of nerves in it and that one slightly taller finger next to it: It fucking sucks.

The next several months were a surreal blur of hospitals and surgery and pain and painkiller and that fascinating stink that medical fabric picks up from rubbing between your skin and the cast-like-thing that keeps your hand and wrist immobilized in the shape of someone pantomiming a duck with a sock puppet. For senior prom, I stuck two googly eyes on top so he could be a proper duck date to accompany me on the dance floor. 

The worst part about having a traumatic injury that mangles your hand isn’t experiencing it in the moment, it’s the recovering afterwards. I don’t remember the pain of my tendon and nerves being severed with sheet metal but I remember crying and starting to black out from the pain of doing physical therapy afterwards. It wasn’t just the stitched-together tendon that had to learn how to move again, but all the muscles in every finger had atrophied from months of rest. Plus, the two actively-damaged fingers were completely numb from having sliced through the nerves. So, for months, my physical therapist would manipulate my numb, atrophied, bloated hand that was zippered together with thick black stitches, teaching it how to move and feel again. AND IT FUCKING SUCKED. It sucked SO HARD. I remember she curled my hand into a loose fist and told me to concentrate as hard as I could on keeping my fingers in that shape as she let go and watching in horror as they just unspooled the second she released them. I had absolutely no control.

“Rumination” is a word I learned while going through my mental health programs at the hospital. 

It means your thoughts are caught in a negative loop which can build to the point of impairing your ability to think and process emotions and overall amplifying your distress or suffering. 

I ruminate a lot.

The programs taught me how to break out of it when I realize I’m doing it again and so I’m a looooot better at escaping that spiral now than I was for my entire life, which is such an amazing skill to have. It’s like drowning your entire life and then a diver gives you an emergency oxygen tank. You’re still underwater and that tank is only going to last for so long but good god you’ll take it, you’ll take that reprieve while you can and suck in that oxygen. 

I ruminate about the harm other people chose to do to me. I mean literal harm, not “offense” or “hurt feelings”. Harm that has damaged me in ways that I have carried for decades and will be a part of my body and mind and heart for the rest of my life. I think of these people and what they did to me every single day and, obviously I can’t actually know this without asking them, but I’m pretty sure they think about me never. And if they did? They’re normal-ass people, not villains twisting their mustaches. We all do in the moment what we think is right. When we lash out at someone? We do it because we feel justified, we think the person deserved it and we are doing the only appropriate action that the situation calls for. They harmed me, they think I deserved it, they don’t realize how badly they harmed me, and they’ve already forgotten it happened. 

That’s my scar tissue.

It’s hard as a rock, dense and inflexible. 

It fills me up with hate like cement.

It drowns me.

I don’t want to live like that.

Repairing my hand and teaching it how to work again was the most physically painful experience of my life and now here I am twenty years later doing it again with my mind and heart and spirit. 

It fucking sucks.

It sucks in all the same ways recovering from my hand mangling sucked, except instead of flesh literally healing in plain sight, it’s all metaphorical healing and can only be seen through analogies.

My hand works just fine now.

I use it every day just as much as the other one- more, in fact, since it’s my dominant hand. I don’t have to baby it, is what I mean. The stitched together tendon is just as sturdy as the rest, but there’s still a good number of nerves that never came back so I still have a very light tingling in those two fingers when they’re touched. And, of course, the scarring across them is impressive when I show it off, although it has faded enough that now people have to study it for a second before they realize what they’re looking at and how far it spreads across my hand. 

I can curl my hand into a fist without trying.

It’s practically impossible to see, but it can’t close quite as tightly as the other one. You can’t tell unless you’re really studying the two of them side by side. The strength wasn’t impacted (I have photos from my pole dancing days proving that), it’s just a tiny bit of flexibility that is blocked by the remnants of scar tissue. I remember when the scars were so thick that they stood out over my fingers like rope and now I have to  turn my hand in the light for people to spot them. 

The damage is there, it always will be, and today my hand is fully functional because I broke down the cement-like scarring even though it was excruciating in the moment.

(MY HAND TRAUMA RECOVERY IS AN ANALOGY FOR RECOVERING FROM MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL TRAUMA, DID U GET IT?)

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ATTACHMENT:

A photo of the thick dried blood-encrusted stitches is attached, view at your own discretion.