Difficult Things To Do With A Splinted Pinky

I mentioned I have a bit of a sports injury that has the smallest finger on my left hand in a splint.

Over the course of the last four days, I have learned a number of things are difficult in this condition.

  • Hit the Q key. I am not a touch typist, gentle reader, so I can still hit the A key as needed. But the left pinky apparently handled the Q key (and sometimes often the SHIFT, CTRL, and ALT keys over there). So, of course, I find myself queuing up lots of quintessential quokkas and whatnot now, which slows me down a lot.
  • Laundry. I am constantly banging the splint into the basket, the side of the washer tub, or the top of the appliances as I shift the laundry. I hadn’t realized I brushed my hand against all these things routinely, but apparently so.
  • Buckling the seat belt when a passenger in a car. I’ve ridden as a passenger a couple of times, and I’ve had to reach across my body to click it as the big splint does not fit in between the seats so well.
  • Close the driver’s side car door. The contraption does not fit into the grip, so I have to reach across my body to close it. Also, I guess I am used to hitting the window open button with that finger, too. And although I can more easily buckle the belt with my right hand whilst sitting in the driver’s seat, grabbing the belt buckle when it is beside the seat to the left is also a chore.
  • Picking up cats one-handed when they (and by they, I mean Chimera) gets into my office chair when I go for a cup of coffee.

Not depicted: catching a football, because if that were easy for me, I would not be in this predicament.

You know, this is not my first sports injury. And all of my injuries tend to be sports injuries, come to think of it. I have always eventually bounced back, but I get a little down while I mend. I mean, this one is not very painful and is only a little inconvenient, but it reminds me that I’m aging, an intimation of mortality that goes meshes well with my mindset in the current dying time. It’s certainly nowhere near what Jack Baruth just suffered–a broken leg–but the thoughts are very similar. They tell me I will more easily dislocate these joints in the future–so how many jabs can I throw in martial arts classes before I do it again? That sort of thing.

Ah, well, the one thing it is not hard to do, and I feared it might: to hold a book to read it. I can set big art books so that they’re resting on my lap and I’m just holding them up with my hand and few working fingers, and I can hold smaller books with a hand and those smaller fingers. So I can still do that, fortunately.

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