Last week I put a hole in my hand

Something interesting has been happening to my body this week. Seven days ago, I fell while skateboarding back from a taco shop in Venice. I ripped up my ankle a little, bruised the outside of my knee, and tore a hole in my palm. The hole was about the size of a quarter and quite deep. I'll spare you the image, but it was pretty gross. My girlfriend shrunk away from it when I first showed her and in general, it is pretty gruesome given the size. It even made my skin crawl a little bit when it first happened.

While at first, it was a major annoyance, my injury now intrigues me. I’ve closely observed my hand heal itself over the past six days and the progress it made has been enthralling. Each day it makes little incremental improvements and then overnight, it leaps forward by a few millimeters.

In the past, I’ve skinned elbows, knicked myself while cooking, even sliced my knee with a ski, but I’ve never paid such close attention to the healing process as I have this in this instance. It may have to do with the fact that this injury is on my hand, and therefore directly in front of my face for most of the day, but regardless of reason, this is my first active observation and fascination with the body reconstruction process.

For a refresher on your high school health class, here are some fun skin facts:

• Your skin regenerates itself completely about every 28 days. It does this by shedding old cells, between 30k-40k a minute, and building new ones.

• Your skin accounts for roughly 15% of your body weight.

• Scar tissue is different from normal skin tissue because it lacks hair and sweat glands

There you go, you can’t say I didn’t try to teach you something today. 

The human body heals wounds like the one on my hand heal by creating collagen to form the foundation for new tissue. It then fills in the wound with granulation tissue, on top of the collagen. Finally, new skin begins to fill in, closing the wound incrementally until it is red, slightly shiny, and all sealed up in a scar.

Falling on my ass while skateboarding gave me a first-person view of my body executing this process.

As of August 27th, I’m about halfway healed. Right now the wound looks like a cutout of a topographical map of a lake, except instead of water there are remnants of blood.

Ew. Sorry for that one. 

Time to get a bit philosophical.

Watching my body repair itself has brought on a much larger reminder that we are not the single "person" that we tend to view ourselves as. I am not just "Eric Brunts" and I'm not only the consciousness that I associate my identity with. I am both that consciousness, AND a massive collection of organs, cells, atoms, and everything in-between. I am comprised of a multitude of different systems all working together to sustain my life and enable me to continue to pump out one blog post every other week (on average). 

Our bodies are miracles. The fact that, without a single thought, we start to repair ourselves immediately after an injury is mind-blowing to think about. If your body is operating as it should, and you are able to walk, run, bike, jump, hug, eat, cook, dance, WHATEVER, you are the product of millions of systems interacting properly. The millions of things that could be going wrong every second of your life are not, and for that reason you (and I) are lucky beyond comprehension.

That has been my reminder this week. In times of relative health and wellbeing, I forget to be grateful for the meat suit that I have. This thing operates almost entirely without me, leaving me free to tap around on my computer and worry about what I’m going to eat for lunch. This accident has been a pleasant, if not painful, reminder that life is miraculous and I am THRILLED to be here.

So if this is trite, and cliche, and something you wish you hadn't read today, then so be it, I can respect that. But for me, I'm going to be staring at my hand ten times a day and expressing gratitude for my body putting in the work to get me back to normal.

“What a marvelous housing unit for my consciousness, I have,” I say today and every day hereafter.