Once upon a time when I was 11 years old, my phys ed class was doing dodgeball in the gym. I was having fun up until the point when someone hurled a ball right at my face. Instinctively, I put up my hand to knock it away.
My little finger was the first officer on the scene and was frankly no match for a spinning ball thrown with such force. The ball won the fight and my finger snapped to one side like a dry twig. I seem to recall the kid who threw the ball apologizing after I got back to school.
After the initial CRACK! moment it didn't exactly hurt, but I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw the way the finger was sticking off sideways, turning purple, and swelling up. The gym teacher came over and assured me that I had merely 'jammed' the finger, and helpfully gave it a few times.
I have the worst luck with random asshole men aggravating my injuries with brute force, don't I?
Anyway, his attempts to pop the finger back in place caused the actual pain to kick in, and because I was a socially retarded little psycho-boy, I didn't know how to tell him to fucking quit it. He finally allowed as how he guessed it might not just be jammed after all, and sent me to the school nurse.
The nurse took one look at the finger before she cursed my gym teacher's stupidity and promptly called my father to take me to a doctor. By the time he showed up on his motorcycle (which was our sole family transportation in the years before the infamous Yellow Rolls Canardly), the finger was nearly twice its original size, dark grayish-purple, and sending jolts of spectacular pain up my arm. The ice packs, they did nothing.
The doctor took a few X-rays and then informed me that (gasp!) my finger had been borked to the sky and back. He made comments regarding the unexpected severity of the fracture, and then set me up with a cast.
Not a splint--a plaster cast that bound the broken finger to its neighbor in a sturdy half-Hook'em-Horn gesture and went all the way up to my elbow.
I had to wear the damn cast for weeks, and I frankly loved it. I think every lonely kid wants the glamour of a cast, even if only your blood relatives ever actually bother to sign it. I was irritated that they wouldn't give me a black one like a boy at school had, but at least it wasn't PINK like my sister's had been when she broke her arm.
Anyway, after a while the glamour of your very own plaster cast wears off. I think that's right around the time the vinegar smell of unwashed arm-sweat starts to overwhelm your person.
I lost a copper penny down the side of the cast at some point, and was unable to retrieve it with pens or chopsticks. By the time the cast came off the coin had oxidized and turned a circle of my arm green. It was awesome.
Anyway, long story short: the finger healed, but was not fixed. To this day, it sticks off as if to point out the direction that long-ago dodgeball had been spinning.
My gimp finger is not anchored to the other digits and does not follow their rules. It has decided to do its own thing and screw the so-called convention of symmetry.
Not only that, but it also has its own soundtrack! The knuckle makes what my friends and family have described as a creepy and/or disgusting TOK TOK TOK noise whenever I bend it. The sound is accompanied by mild pain from the finger joint, which I stopped noticing long ago, but which has recently become problematic enough to warrant my renewed attention.
This past January, when I was down in Omaha watching my Mom die and be turned into a garbage bag full of ashes, I took to wearing her favorite cheap-ass ring on my left hand. I'm not big into jewelry, but meh.
Anyway, I noticed that whenever I'd wash my hands, Gimp Finger would hurt like the blue blazes when mashed together with my ring finger. I figured the excruciating burning sensation meant I'd hit a nerve or something and resolved to be more careful in the future. Nothing in the world feels as horrible as that escalating burning pinching feeling you get when you fuck up a nerve.
Well, it's now almost April, and I haven't worn a ring in over a month. But still, the pain is getting worse and worse. It's isolated to this area:
All it takes to set it off is touching the outlined area. If I pick anything up in that hand, I have to watch that it isn't touching Gimp Finger, or else I'm apt to drop it from the blaze of agony that follows. It also hurts like a bitch to press on the knuckles, but only of Gimp Finger.
A case of bonsai arthritis, maybe? Seebs suggested it might be bone spurs, but I know next to nothing about the phenomenon.
Splinter Thumb (you remember him, from last February?) and Gimp Finger are now in direct competition to see who can be the most irritating minor injury to my left hand.
I just wish I knew why, all of a sudden, Gimp Finger has betrayed me. I've been nice to it. I spent years indulging its eccentricities with nary a complaint. And now it is a COMMUNIST FINGER, rejecting all my values and hurting like a bitch when I try to put on my seat-belt. Down with the bosses!
Anyway, there's the story of Gimp Finger. Look out for flying balls, kids. D:
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