OUCHIES

I'm the kind of person who is always mildly injured.  It's not that I'm clumsy (I'm not), but also not because I plays rough sports.  I just push myself or engage in risky actions.  And even then, I don't mean that I go rock-climbing or parachuting.

It's the small daily events that get me.  I got annoyed at a squirrel once and tossed a rock at it and messed up my rotator cuff for 6 months.  I ordered some large stones (small boulders?) and hurt my back moving them around a small pond I built.  Once I was cutting a branch off of an apple tree and didn't realize the branch was torqued.  When cut through, it sprang up against my hand pushing against the saw blade.  I cut the the finger to the bone.  These things happen.  I'm active and live alone. so I always have to do things that should really take 2 people.  There is always some strained muscle or sore joint...

So today I am am humorously writing about a fingertip.  "A fingertip"?  Yes.

On New Year's Eve, I set a small fire in the basement fireplace.  Nothing big.  I don't have any good fireplace wood.  I used some clean wood scraps and some newspaper.  I just felt a fire was traditional.  Well, in the course of feeding newspaper to the fire, I brushed the hot grate with a finger.  OUCH!

But that sort of thing is common.  I work in the garden, sometimes I get a blister.  I work in the yard, sometimes I strain a muscle.  BFD.  I pretty much ignored it.  2 days later, I noticed the tip on a finger was numb and hard.  I remembered the grate incident.  But it didn't swell up like burns usually do.

It just sat there.

Today, 17 days later, it suddenly fell apart!  17 days???

It went apart like sunburned skin.  All of a sudden and nothing first, the skin was flaking off.  I've had burns before.  I managed to drop a pot of spaghetti water once and burned both legs badly.  And having a fireplace, I've had my share of minor burns.  But not delayed like this!

It isn't painful yesterday.  I was able to rub the old skin off and the new skin isn't sensitive.  But it sure was weird!

If a blister had formed the day after and it hurt and swelled like such things usually do, I wouldn't have bothered to mention it.  But the delay and lack of the normal irritations of a burn made this very strange.