They call me “Gnarly”
Thinking about typing distracts me from typing, making me error-prone and slow.
I just recently explained why I can’t touch-type. I still reach over 70WPM, so it doesn’t bother me.
I learned how to in high school, but pretty much I typed 5-fingered whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. (1 finger is my right thumb.) Then I broke my right index finger. (Doctor’s first, technical description of my knuckle, when she thought my little sister was actually my daughter: “It’s shmushed.” Doctor’s second description, when she had been disabused of this notion: “You broke the knuckle into several pieces, and one was destroyed, and one was turned upside down. It’s pretty much useless.” Doctor’s final comment: “Childbirth hurts more.”)
I had an almost-immediate surgery on that finger. Sort of immediate. I forget, exactly. But then it overlapped all my other fingers, except the pinkie. And the thumb; it couldn’t really overlap the thumb.
It was always in the way. But I could more or less bend it, though I couldn’t do anything else with it. Also I couldn’t pick up change out of a change purse. Strange but true.
So I had another surgery a few years later to try to straighten it out. (Go universal health care.) This involved cutting out a pie-shaped wedge of bone, so it was bent towards my thumb below the knuckle, and then bent the other way at my knuckle, to average out sort of unbent. Conceptually: sort of gross. Practically: incredibly painful.
I’m a wimp. I’m a big huge wimp, who was ecstatic to find my littler sister is a bigger huger wimp, and a hypochondriac to boot. But we’re both right up there. So after the accident and the pain from the first surgery, I was a little worried about the pain from the second surgery. Quite reasonably. It hurt a lot, and I don’t really care if childbirth hurts more, because you get something better than a deformed finger at the end. As I was lying down in the OR and chatting with the anaesthesiologist (in French, which was weird only because both of us were anglophones), I was nervous. And my veins were scared, too, and in hiding. And she was rubbing my hands, trying to warm them up so she could see the veins and have some clue where to stick in the needle. I much appreciated that she did that instead of just jamming it in. Also I dislike needles, and I hadn’t brought in distracting reading material.
She asked me if I was nervous. Yes. “Are you scared you’re not going to wake up from the surgery?” Not until you mentioned it, no.
When I woke up, I cried constantly until all the anaesthetic was out of my system. Weird reaction. I preferred it the first time, when I was couting backwards from 10, and thinking “10 this isn’t working, 9 I’m not the least bit sleepy 8 7 ooooh, a shot of Demerol, I love you, recovery room nurse”.
My index finger now only overlaps my middle finger a bit, but I can’t bend it at all.
I use this as my excuse for why I can’t use chopsticks.