Ten Little...

Oh I wish I were...


When I roll into the parking lot at the hospital, and after I turn off my car, I don’t get out right away. What I do is place my hands on the wheel, not at ten and two like I’m supposed to do when I’m driving, but at eleven and one, closer together both geographically and chronologically I suppose. I put my palms against the wheel and point my fingers up like pickets made from pale little sausages. Then I lightly put my Oscar Myers together and see how they line up. I perform these little surprise inspections each time I visit my rheumatologist. Yes, I have a rheumatologist, as if it is the most natural thing there can be, like having an accountant or a barber. At some point after I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis I was given a pamphlet that explained some of the possible symptoms of living with this condition. The one that caught my attention was the deformity of the fingers, and I decided that it was the progress, or lack of progress, of this particular symptom that I would use as a watermark to determine how I was getting on and how well my treatments were working.

So I sit in my car outside his office and see which of my fingers have remained loyal and which finger’s loyalty has come into question.

Starting on my right hand with the pinky, I see that he is as straight and true as a wiener dog that spends his days patrolling under the kitchen table of a large, sloppy family. Next comes the ring finger, who looks fine until I get to the second knuckle, where he leans away from his neighbor finger as if it had knocked on his door and shoved a copy of The Watchtower at him; still not too bad. That neighbor finger, sometimes called the “driving finger”, seems pretty strait although it does look to be rolled slightly to toward the ring finger, maybe inquiring how the Watchtower pamphlet was working out. The index finger is rolled over even more toward the “driving finger” and it is bowed so it only touches it at the knuckle and the nail. There is some daylight between the two.

On my left hand the index finger is behaving pretty much like his twin on the right; rolled and bowed. The driving finger on the left hand looks wiener dog straight if that wiener dog were saddled-backed from being ridden too much, perhaps by a small monkey. And by the way, is there anything funnier than a monkey riding a dog? The ring finger is straighter than his doppelganger but underneath there is a bump over which my wedding ring use to slide. I had to take it off before it had to be cut off. The ring, not the bump. The pinky on the left has abandoned all dog-loyal pretense and juts away from his brothers as if I were getting ready to properly hold a cup of tea.

I’ve been inspecting the sausage brothers for a few years now and I think I can safely say that none have wandered too much further afield since I began. Although I don’t entirely trust the teacup pinky so I’m keeping an eye on him.

You may be wondering about my thumbs. Well my thumbs have been loyal little fireplugs since they were installed. They’re there every morning like little drill sergeants, providing an example to the rest of the regiment, and always ready to give movie reviews or catch me a free ride.

Just so you don’t think my finger inspections are all I use to chart the progress of my condition and its treatment my rheumatologist looks at blood tests and examines my fingers, hands, toes, feet, elbows, and knees, and he says I’m doing very well thank you.

But if the continued, albeit slow, drifting of my digits is inevitable I suppose I’ll figure a way to live with it. It reminds me of a story I heard while listening to baseball on the radio, probably during a rain delay. As the story goes there was this catcher who at the end of his career, and at the end of thousands of balls fouled off his hands and hundreds of base runners motoring around third, was never asked for directions, because by that time he couldn’t point just one way.