It’s been a couple of weeks since I mistook my thumb for a shiitake mushroom and tried to slice the tip off of it with a chef’s knife. For those who may not have read the post a couple of weeks ago, I was slicing up mushrooms in my kitchen for a slow cooker recipe I was trying. I was using a beautiful, carbon steel chef’s knife that my wife and I purchased only months ago. Razor sharp and quite hefty, I was hacking away at the mushrooms pretending to be Gordon fuckin’ Ramsey when my eye caught movement outside my kitchen window…
Also for those of you who may not be aware, although I‘ve mentioned it on occasion, is that I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, way back before it was fashionable. My training in the martial arts and Buddhism have helped me to focus and control some of the worse symptoms into adulthood but there’s no denying that sometimes I tend to squirrel with the best of them. The blade came down as I looked off to my left and cut through about a third of the meat in my thumb. A nearly four-hour ER visits and four stitches later, this was the result…
Cursing myself for my attention span and regretful of the temporary use of my left thumb, its been an uninteresting couple of weeks. The big issue for Type-1 Diabetics is that we can often take much longer than the average person to heal from injuries. This is generally from our poor blood circulation making it harder for blood cells to reach the wound to help with the rebuilding process. Not to mention that since we have difficulty metabolizing sugar into energy since we don’t self-produce insulin, poor blood sugar levels will also affect the body’s ability to heal.
As a result, I buckled up for a month or more of having a bandaged thumb. You never realize just how much your use your thumb until you no longer can. Buttoning shirts, tying shoes and even using the washroom has become more of a challenge. But as the past couple of weeks have elapsed, I’ve come to realize that I don’t necessarily have the depth of Diabetic issues that others do or as I’ve described in the previous paragraph. As a result, I heal much better and faster than the average Type-1. After two weeks of bandages and dissolving stitches, here’s where I’m at now…
It looks red and angry, and it is! On Tuesday night I agreed to play some retro Nintendo with my 9-year old and winced when I realized I needed the very red spot you see to use the keypad. But besides the flaking dead skin and a bit of a sore, hard spot on the top, which I assume is now scar tissue, I’m healing up like a champ. I’m glad to see it but the itching and flaking skin has been driving me nuts.
The point of this post is to speak to how important it is to maintain one’s blood sugars and maintain some level of physical fitness. This applies to everyone but is even more important if you have Type-1 Diabetes. If I had poor control and didn’t care for myself physically, I’d probably be looking at another couple of weeks before I reached the point you see in the second photo. People often don’t see or understand the difference. This is an excellent visual example. ☯️
The Blogging Buddhist 