I’m grateful that today’s trip to radiology was uneventful, and that my hand does not appear to be broken. I dropped a heavy metal bar on it a couple of weeks ago while I was assembling an inversion table, and screamed. Since then it’s only gotten marginally better: there’s a low level pain most of the time, and when I do certain things with it the pain spikes to that level that causes your gut to jump. The pain’s over in a flash when I back out of the movement, but that’s meant I’ve almost dropped a few things. I was worried that there was something seriously wrong that normal daily activities might be exacerbating. Whew! Though I’m not sure the news that it’s ‘advanced degenerative change at the base of the thumb’ is any better: just more arthritis. My skeleton is letting me down (but I’m still grateful to have a largely functional skeleton).

I am grateful for the X-ray, and the fortuitous accident that led to its discovery. I’ve had several recently, and many over the course of my life, and though the radiation can be dangerous, the information garnered has been worth the risk, in my experience. I’m grateful for the various X-ray technicians that have captured those images, for the radiologists who have read them (and for all the conditions of their lives that led them to those careers, etc…). Another fascinating discovery in today’s X-ray was ‘a small metal density foreign body in the tip of the middle finger.’ You just never know! Perhaps it’s the microchip that came in the vaccine.

I regret that I didn’t take a picture of the X-ray when they let me look at it, but I was in that purely functional state I get into under duress and didn’t think creatively. Oh well! But I imagine it looks something like this. Ouch!