Shooting the Bird

I’m not a hunter – never have been. Some of my family and friends are. That said, I go to the store and various eateries where I indulge in roast and fried chicken, ducks, quail, Cornish game hens, and geese that Susan prepares to perfection. I’ve been known to eat turkey although it is not my preferred fowl. While I do not hunt them, I am still responsible for bringing them to their demise by proxy.

This evening, I sacrificed the lives of dozens of crawdads to make a crawfish boil for the two of us and a nursing colleague from my days as a medical director for a health plan. We had not seen one another for the two years of the COVID apocalypse, and it was delightful to catch up. Boiling crawdads does not require a firearm, but boiling water is just as deadly to the arthropods as a projectile would be.

I’ve been plagued by stenosing tenosynovitis of the hands for more than a decade – the common appellation is trigger finger. The past few years, I have had few to no episodes of triggering. Alas, two weeks ago, I had an event that froze my right-hand middle finger (the bird finger) DIP joint in a flexed position. The DIP is the last phalangeal joint – the one furthest from the body. I have splinted it, but that has not yet released the extensor tendon. The splint just keeps the tendon from shortening and causing a permanent deformity. I need to see a hand surgeon in the next few weeks, I think.

Well, at least with the splint, that finger is in its fully extended position. That way, I can still shoot the bird by flexing the MCP joints of the other fingers of that hand. Am I impaired? Yes. Disabled? No!