I injured my left thumb at kendo yesterday evening which resulted in yet another trip to the E.R.. It happened at the end of practice while I was practicing for an upcoming promotion test (I’m testing for 1-kyu): my left thumb was sticking out, not protected by my shinai (bamboo sword) tsuba (guard) and hit my opponent’s shinai in such a way that my thumb nail got stuck inside my kote (gauntlet), tearing part of it in a quite painful way. I asked to be excused at the end of the fight (luckily it happened right at the end because I don’t think I could have continued afterwards…), cleaned the injury and with the help of fellow kendokas, taped my thumb up.

I wanted to have the injury checked by a doctor to be sure of what to do about it so, not knowing what else to do, I drove to the closest hospital where I presented myself at around 10:20pm. I got through triage pretty fast, foolishly hoping that I wouldn’t have to stay there too long. I really only wanted to have my thumb checked quickly and be told what to do, if anything. I don’t quite understand how E.R.s work: patients are triaged based on urgency but in my case, my injury was obviously not very urgent. I am pretty sure that the nurse at triage could have looked at my thumb and told me what to do but she never looked at my thumb. I had to wait for a proper doctor. I “leveled-up” to phase 2 at 11:50pm when I was brought to an E.R. bed/examination room (for those of you who have never been there, an E.R. examination room is basically just a bed with some equipment on the wall and delimited by curtains that can be pulled to give the patient a very limited privacy). I waited there for another 15 minutes (during which a nice girl (another nurse) asked all about me (making sure that I was properly insured but I prefer to think she was flirting :) )) before a doctor finally came to see me. After explaining what happened, the guy looked at my thumb and offered to clip the dangling part of the nail, even offering local anaesthesia. I decided to try the operation without first, which ended up not being as bad as I thought it would. After applying some anti-bacterial cream, gauze and tape, I was good to go. Or so I thought since I had to wait for another 10 minutes before being finally discharged. All in all, I felt like I wasted both the hospital time and resources and mine. If there was a better alternative (knowing that I really wanted to have the injury checked by a qualified person), please let me know…

I finally made it home at half past midnight where the real ordeal began. It turns out that the local antiseptic that the doctor applied on my thumb had also some pain-relieving effects and these were starting to wear out. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to sleep when you can feel each of your heartbeats as a flashing pulse of white-hot pain in your thumb (or any other part of your body for that matter) but I was to experience the fact that it’s rather inconvenient. Tossing and turning, I came to understand why ripping nails is in such high favor among torture specialists. Not standing it anymore, I got up and raided the ice cubes in the freezer which I put in a Ziplock™, all of which I strapped around my thumb with tape. This contraption finally allowed me to find some relief at around 4am. Ice is GOOD! :)

I managed to get a couple of hours of uninterrupted shuteye time which was also good and woke up to a surprisingly mild pain, making me wonder about the efficacy of nail-ripping as a long term torture technique. I suspect that the efficacy lies in the immediate pain and on the psychological effect: for some reason, nails ripped apart evoke a quite vivid mental imagery of pain… :)

Now I just hope that my thumb will be better in time for me to be able to participate in the regional federation championship and promotion test in a little more than a week for which I was training when the injury occurred…

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