We All Have Something
Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
My mother told me I was born with two thumbs on my left hand. I assume she knew what she was talking about, but I have no memory from my infant self. The doctors guessed that some gene coding got confused and created two tiny appendages where only one was supposed to be. During my first week or so of life, some surgeon made a choice and decided one thumb was enough. My mom said they tied a string around the extra one, short-circuiting the blood supply, and it fell off on its own. Maybe? I have no idea. What I have left is an awkward narrow digit like a forefinger with a nail and a smooth lump where a joint should be, but isn’t–all of which is attached to my hand by a normal joint at the base of the “thumb”.
Oddly enough, I have no baby pictures which show the double growths, so I have to trust my mother didn’t make up this story. My brother used to refer to me as a freak outside the family of humanoids because I only have one opposable thumb. (Turns out, one thumb was enough to thump him solidly in the nose.) I hardly ever notice this tiny disability except when I’m peeling vegetables or braiding hair. The thumb doesn’t bend, so I keep dropping whatever I’m trying to hold for my right hand to work on.
Because I am right-handed, I was well into middle age before my thumb presented much of a problem of any kind. One day, I was writing an assignment on the board when a student interrupted me unexpectedly. Startled, I turned around, slamming my left hand hard into the blackboard. A sharp pain whizzed down my thumb into my wrist. It hurt. The thumb throbbed for a while, but I took a couple of Ibuprofen, and the pain eased off. I wasn’t worried about it healing. I knew there was no joint inside to break, so I figured I’d just bruised it, and time would take care of it.
But several weeks later it still ached, and I was still popping pain relief morning and night. On a routine visit for a check-up, I mentioned the problem to my doc. He’d never noticed my deformed thumb—practically no one ever did, but he said if it was still bothering me, I ought to have it looked at. He sent me to an orthopedic hand specialist at Cottonwood Hospital. I felt a little foolish when I introduced myself at the reception desk.
“What’s your problem, Ma’am?”
I held up my thumb.
“Oh!” She smiled pleasantly. “If you’ll take a seat, the doctor will see you.”
A few minutes later, a nurse showed up and led me across the hall to an X-ray machine. “We need a picture,” she said. Of three inches of thumb? It seemed like a lot of trouble.
Once a tech took photos of the thumb from several points of view, the nurse had me sit back down in the waiting room. I waited. Then I waited some more. Other patients who had arrived after me came and went. Almost an hour passed. Finally, the nurse came back.
“Mrs. Voorhies? You’re going to want to see this.” She walked me down a hall to a small room crowded with 15 or 20 people—some of them wearing white coats with stethoscopes, some in scrubs, all staring intently at a dozen enlarged pictures glowing with a foot-tall image of my stunted little thumb. The buzz of discussion stopped abruptly when I walked in.
“Mrs. Voorhies?” A doc separated himself from the group. “Thanks for coming in. None of us has ever seen anything like your thumb before. It’s fascinating.”
Great. Now I was a medical anomaly. They asked me a bunch of questions I couldn’t answer (I had been a newborn after all) about what medical procedure had been done. In the end, the X-rays showed a crack right across the bone where a joint would have been had it been a more normal shape. Scar tissue was already starting to form. “It’s well on its way to healing itself,” the doc told me. He gave me a little splint to keep the thumb stable and sent me home.
The next day I reported all this to my students, and after they stopped laughing, one of them said, “I guess we all have something.”
Yep. I guess we do. Most of us learn to adapt. Sometimes it’s obvious like my fractured thumb; sometimes it’s not. That’s the danger of assumptions. Just because the outside seems OK, doesn’t mean there’s not a wound within. But like my little thumb, patience with a dose of special care is the prescription which gives most of us the time we need to heal.