Broken Finger Blues

It was the 6:30 pm class on a Friday at my CrossFit gym and the warmup called for holding a pair of kettlebells overhead for 90 seconds. Not sure what weight to grab, I asked the women from the previous class what they had used and a consensus of 35 pounds seemed to emerge, so that's what I put in each hand.

The weight was really heavy but I made a deal with myself that I would stick it out for 60 seconds. At the one-minute mark, I dropped the kettle bells from the overhead position to the ground between my feet in one swift motion. The force of plopping them down from so high caused the weights to bounce slightly and my fingers were still holding the two handles as they bumped into each other.

When I woke up the next day with a swollen, purple finger, I decided to go to urgent care and the X-ray reveled a broken finger: the distal phalanx of my left ring finger - the bone closest to the fingernail. My ring finger looked like the ring finger in this picture. (My middle finger was not broken like the hand in this X-ray.)

This is NOT my X-ray; I saw mine but wasn't allowed to take a picture of it!

Image via http://www.aafp.org

I was scheduled to compete in my very first on-site CrossFit competition in early September but now I can't. It was even challenging to drive home from the urgent care site with the splint restricting movement of all three joints of my left ring finger. Now I've been upgraded to a shorter finger guard that just covers the distal and middle phalanges, so I have more use of my hand.

I take my hands so for granted. They wash dishes, pull weeds, hold my dog's leash, and direct my car's steering wheel. At the gym, my hands support me for burpees, pushups, and handstands and grip barbells, pullup bars, and the rowing machine. My hands type my schoolwork, emails, and even this blog post, transferring my ideas to the computer just about as fast as I could speak them. They hold grocery bags, wash my hair, clip my nails, open doors, and put my hair in a ponytail. My hands give high fives and fist bumps to students and have even pulled out a first grader's loose tooth.

I broke my ankle the summer before 2nd grade and was on crutches when school started. By the summer of 1999, I'd been walking for over 6 years and suddenly that skill I took for granted was taken away from me. All these years later, I still remember the excitement of getting to the point in my recovery where I started wearing a walking boot. I'd stroll around school with that boot and just think it was the coolest thing in the world to get to walk.

As the saying goes, you don't know what you have until it's gone. Fortunately, I regained full function of my ankle and am expected to do the same with my finger; it's only a temporary "gone", but it's enough to shake me up and make me appreciate one of the most basic gifts most humans share: our hands.