The Eyelash and the Cuticle

The other night I was lying in bed, thinking about stuff. About work and life and my cats and Planet of the Apes.

And about my finger and something that had happened to it earlier that day.

In order to understand why I would be thinking about my finger, it's necessary to take a step back in time. Back to the time when I was in my mother's womb and the Flying Spaghetti Monster was handing out attributes. For whatever reason, I was cursed with a horrible innate sense of direction, but I was given extremely healthy cuticles.

My cuticles have served me well: I've never had ingrown finger- or toe-nails and when I got my pedicure in Las Vegas my feet were deemed "flawless". (I actually blogged about this, but it's among the "Temporarily Lost Blog Entries" of 2007 that are awaiting migration from MySpace.)

So I've gone through my whole life not having to worry about my fingernails and cuticles too much... until about two months ago.

Two months ago, inexplicably, my right index finger became inflamed, right along the middle-finger side of the cuticle. It hurt and eventually it popped and pus came out. It was sick. But the swelling went down and I thought it was over.

It wasn't over.

About three weeks later, it came back with a vengeance. Again the finger swelled and it hurt and it popped along the fingernail and again the off-white nastiness seeped out.

I had no idea why. I thought, originally, it was a cat scratch that got me, but two in the same place? That seemed doubtful. So I ascribed it to finger-HIV and vowed not to shake hands without a condom.

Not really.

I didn't know what it was, and I still don't... or do I?

The other day, I looked at my finger. It was no longer swollen, but the right side of the fingernail had sort of lifted away from the finger underneath (like the "crescent" at the end of nails, but this was along my cuticle).

It would have been wise, perhaps, to leave it alone. To shrug and say, "*shrug*" to myself and to get back to work.

Instead, I poked at it, and I saw a black line. I saw a black line underneath my nail, where the nail was lifted away from the skin.

At that point, I couldn't let it be. I poked and prodded and eventually got the black line out. It was nicely and snugly wedged in place, and took some doing getting out. The "black line" was... an eyelash.

You see, gentle reader, that in addition to magnificent cuticles, I have been blessed by the FSM with rather luscious eyelashes.

(Yes, I know. "Vanity at its finest.")

The reason I was pondering this, when I had important things like Planet of the Apes to go over mentally, is because I wondered which came first.

Did the eyelash settle in the space between my fingernail and skin? It's definitely possible, and it's perhaps probable, that I had rubbed my eye and it somehow lodged itself there.

Perhaps, though, the eyelash caused the infections. Perhaps it penetrated my hitherto pristinely healthy cuticles and caused the pain and the pus and the pondering.

I pondered about the relationship of cause and effect... how we can have things happen to us and notice something unexpected in our lives and not be sure whether it caused, was caused, or was unrelated to those things.

I pondered about the unknowability of some things... how we can have as much data about something as anyone in the history of the world and just not know--and be pretty confident we will never know--the answer to something.


I pondered about all of this, and I wondered whether any of it (eyelash, cuticle, cause and effect, unknowability) is relevant.

Then I went to sleep.