Loose Cans

So the other night Grandma, conscientious, inquires after my internals. These, I report, are fine; it's my externals that have betrayed me. First it was the busted arm (not just the elbow, but the wrist, it turned out). Then, after that healed up, it was a plague of deep cuts on my fingertips, all acquired at work. Just slashed 'em right up somehow. This sounds minor, but when you're working wrist-deep in alcohol and lime juice, deep cuts become sources of ridiculous pain. These, off work for the past week, have healed, only to be replaced by something entirely novel: paronychia in my left middle finger. Paronychia is an infection around the fingernail. My whole fingertip has swollen to absurd dimensions, gone red-purple, and causes me no shortage of real pain. I noticed it about five days ago, and spent the first three days more or less marveling at the size to which it had grown, and its luminous color. When I flips you off, you stays flipped. Rudolph the red nosed birdie. So finally, yesterday I haul myself down to the ER at St. Luke's Roosevelt, since my GP's not in, embarrassed at bringing a mere florid finger into a ward we generally associate with blood-gushing head wounds. Disappointingly, there are no head wounds in evidence, just limping people or people with cuts. Maybe they were bleeding internally, I don't know. In any case nothing spectacular enough to make the trip enjoyable. So I sat in "fast track" (yeah, right) for an hour or so and made it sixty pages into Portnoy's Complaint. Finally my name is called. I go into a small room where the nurse tells me to remove my pants. I tell her, No, it's just a finger, but I consider doing it anyhow, because I'm not one to pass on any opportunity to drop trou in a public space. Ultimately I keep them on. After I read another fifteen pages of Portnoy, the doctor comes in. He promptly pronounces it Paronychia. It will have to be evacuated. Quite all right, I say. He shows me where he will deliver the anaesthetic. All well and good; it seems like it will be a small prick from one of those butterfly needles I so enjoy. Everything is grand. He goes to fetch the equipment. He returns bearing a fucking spear. As he rubs my knuckle with iodine, it becomes apparent that he is in fact proposing to impale me on this thing. I nearly pass out then and there. He splays my hand on the table, palm-down, and informs me that this is going to sting a bit. I recall the doctor in the New Yorker cartoon, informing the frightened little boy, "This is going to hurt like hell." It does. It goes in. Then it keeps going. And keeps going. It actually goes clear the fuck through my finger. If my head were not so aswarm with pain I would look to see; as it is, feeling the sting of the needle on the other side of my hand is quite enough. At last, after an eternity, he pulls back. Then he switches to the other side of the knuckle, shoves her in again and I completely fall apart. I do not make a peep, mind you, but to make some joke which I have since forgotten, but he has the presence of mind, mid-evisceration, to ask if I would like to lie down. I nod and curl into a fetal ball. Finally he is done. With the application of the anaesthetic. I will now lie in that position for another 10 minutes, shivering in sweltering shock, as it kicks in. Then, once my finger is so numbed (though I am not) that he could have chopped it off and I would have felt nothing in the slightest, he attacks for real, using this medieval implement, some kind of shrunken hauberk, to perform demolishing excavations on my finger which are absolutely not fit for publication here. Mostly because I wasn't about to look at what was coming out of there. But the queer thing is this. I, of course, feel no pain, but my body does. I go physically into spasm again, sweating, breathing shallowly, and this time, I can't for the life of me figure out why. It turns out to have something to do with the nerve endings in the hand--specifically their abundance. That's why the application of the anaesthetic hurt so much. It seems that even though I can't feel pain, those nerves are still being violated, and the body responds as it would otherwise. What an exceptionally stupid body. Oh, well. I guess there's a great metaphor in there somewhere.

Oh, and I don't know if it did dick. There's still swelling and pain. On antibiotics and codeine (whoo!). All I want for Christmas are two functioning arms.

It wasn't more than 24 hours after I walked in the door, at long, long last, relieved more than words can say, that I turned around, headed out the door, and shipped out to Boston with my fellow P-eregrinator. Spent a few days at Harvard, largely in the company in the ever-obliging Boom-Boom Birgler, with lovely visit paid by Jared, Kay and Ruff Reider, and decided that since P-utz is not likely to be in Chicago next year, Harvard it is. I will apply to all three, Harvard, Yale and Chicago, as a one-year foreign student. Possibly others. If I get into none I will very likely not go to college next year.

But I'm back now, if only for a short time. I leave for Kansas City on the 24th and will not return to New York until May. Hence, we will be having the great white New Year's party a bit early, on the 22nd. December 22nd. Mark your calendars, start your engines and honk your horns. It's party time.