Glass Half Empty

Happily Melancholy... I think that describes how I feel this evening. It's either a wistful recollection of happy times past, or a sadness that those times are past. I'm not sure which it is, but it's not an altogether unpleasant feeling.

On the other topic, well... There was a discussion on IRC earlier about interesting scars, and it occurs to me that I have a few. Y'see, I was born with a Simple Syndactyly: the index and middle fingers of my right hand are fused, or rather, they never finished separating. In the womb, human hands and feet develop as complicated plates of flesh and bone, then when the fetus is about 16 weeks old, they split into fingers and toes (targeted apoptosis: the cells not destined to make up the finished extremeties self-destruct). In some cases, this doesn't quite work right, and people like me are the result: it's rare, but I've run into two or three other people with the condition in my lifetime. Amusingly, Wikipedia doesn't believe I'm possible, as none of the five types of syndactyly it describes matches me. Go figure.

When I was a fair bit younger (low single-digit years), a series of surgeries was performed to separate the digits, and they were partially successful. I have independent movement in both (although they're still joined to just below the middle knuckle), although the fact that my middle finger is entirely missing its middle joint can be a bit of an inconvenience. For the most part, I've developed coping strategies that involve reassigning the fingers of my hand (these days, my ring finger does a damn good job as an index finger, for example). For the most part, people don't notice, and I'm fine with that. I'm not ashamed of being a little different (as those as know me will be very aware), but equally I see no need to shove it in people's faces. So yes, to finish this peculiar little medical digression, and to come back to the original topic: I have a tracery of almost faded, silvery graft and incision scars curling around my right index and middle fingers, from top to bottom.

Interesting? Perhaps. TMI? Quite possibly. So it goes. ...NaBloPoMo is hard :)

The Glass: amusingly-shaped | NaBloPoMo: 9/30