My right index fingertip is leathery and a bit numb today; the reason for this is a no doubt boring tale I shall share with you anyway.

‘Cause I’m a giver.

Monday night I was fiddling with a hangnail on said right index  fingertip and it was sore. In a misguided effort to stave off any infection my minstrations may have caused, I soaked a cotton pad in a mixture of  alcohol and peroxide and used a strip of  electrical tape to hold it on my finger.

 In hindsight, this was a poorly thought out choice of action, but in my own defense I’m kinda stupid sometimes. 

 Moving on. I had planned to remove the tape and pad before going to bed, but I fell asleep. This was the second, and somewhat more severely stupid, choice I regret making, even if it wasn’t my consious brain that did the deciding but my … what ever brain-bit does the falling asleep thing. I don’t know – Dammit, Jim;  I’m a receptionist, not a neurologist.

Anyhoo, I woke up with my fingertip on fire. It was tingling and felt really odd. I got the makeshift bandage off and nearly screamed. I had a corpse-finger. It was dead white and wrinkled to the point that it was almost smooth again, just a few deep, really deep, creases tracking across the surface to show that all was not well in Fingerburg. It was incredibly sensitive to everything –  water, heat, cold, touch. I can’t imagine how my poor little nerve ending have been doing.

 It took most of the day for the unnatural paleness to fade and it’s still a little wrinkled today but the skin has gone all leathery (as I mentioned up there somewhere) and feels strange. As superpowers obtained through careless accidents, this rates right up there with super-flatulence gained from eating irradiated beans.

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