My poor deformed finger

Well, I finished finger therapy yesterday after my April 4 accident in Rotorua, New Zealand, when I broke a tendon on a right-hand finger trying to stuff clothes into my backpack. It was a long haul of splinting and exercises, and, like the last time I acquired what’s known as a “mallet finger” (doing exactly the same thing but in São Tomé over a decade ago), I knew it was likely that the tendon, which reheals, would never do so in a way to allow the finger to be straight.

My other mallet finger, the middle one on the same hand, healed with about a ten-degree bend. This one didn’t do as well: they measured the bend at twenty degrees. That is acceptable for all functional purposes (though borderline); the bend is only aesthetically displeasing. I could have had surgery to straighten it, but why bother? That would have involved putting a wire in the finger and then removing it—and a long process of healing and rehealing.

Anyway: voilà.  You can see the difference in angle between the normal and mallet finger. But I can still type and do everything I could do before, and there’s neither pain nor awkwardness.

And so our bodies decay, accumulating injuries and deformities as we age. I’ll go to the grave with this bent finger, my only consolation being that after the tendon decays, my skeleton will finally have a straight digit!