Knife, meet Hand! – The Anniversary!

Today is the one year anniversary of me cutting my own fingers with a very sharp bread knife. Below is a small reflection on how things have been, are just now and will be in the future.

The fingers have healed up nicely so you can only see thin scars by now.  I only recently noticed the subtle scars from the stitching, looks a bit frankensteinish!

Scarring is only cosmetic though, the real damage is the nerve damage. The status there is almost unchanged. Even if the scars might be less touchy now I still get jolts of pain from direct pressure on the them, it happens when gripping metal cutlery in a bad way or grabbing a thin door handle, very often metal objects. I say jolts because each time it happens I flinch so the pressure and pain is removed, it reminds of of the jolts you get when you hit your elbow nerve.

When I have used my hands to carry heavy things with a tight grip, which naturally exposes the inside of my fingers to high pressure over time, I have experienced the sensation of heat, wetness, cold and other tactile feedback which is mismatched to the real life situation. My fingers also stay tingly for some time after putting down whatever I carried.

Both my fingers are still numb, meaning reduced sense of touch and other sensory input, all the way from the cuts to the tip, with the sensation that they are half asleep. Maybe a little less numb than before, but not so much different.

The doctor told me that the nerve damage could heal in a year or two, or never. As I have not experienced any real improvement in one full year I am suspecting my fingers will stay like this for a really long time, most likely, which is something I actually have come to terms with.

Incredibly I managed to cut myself in such an angle that the sides of my fingers that touch the keyboard when I am typing still behave like normal, the nerve damage did not reach there. Actually when I think about it, it makes me feel very lucky. The same angle also saved my tendons, which I have been told are hard to heal properly as well as being painful, even though I pushed the knife down to the bone.