Ow, my thumb

My left thumb hurts. It might be Neil Gaiman's fault.

I'm not sure when this started, but I think it was this weekend. I noticed a soreness in my left thumb, in the first (or is it the second?) joint - the second one down from the tip, the point where the thumb joins the hand. The soreness actually caused a loss of function in my left hand: I could no longer use my thumb to hold things, so my left hand was mostly useless except for typing.

I noticed a bony bulge at the base of my thumb, at the knuckle. It looks like a blister or boil, but it is hard to the touch.

Could this be arthritis? Maybe. At the half-century mark, such things start to be expected. I've never had arthritis before, so I don't know what it feels like.

A more intriguing possibility hit me this afternoon. On Saturday I picked up the latest issue of the comic book serialization of Neil Gaiman's American Gods. A good deal of this issue is dedicated to Mr. Ibis's recounting of the story of a slave girl and her twin brother, instrumental respectively in bringing belief in the old gods of Africa to the New World, and in leading a slave rebellion that eventually led to the liberation of Haiti. As an aside, Mr. Ibis (a manifestation of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth) mentions the punishment one of the slave girl's children received for demonstrating the ability to read: one of his thumbs was cut off.

I thought about how terrible a punishment this would be, how difficult life would be without a thumb, particularly a slave's life of unrelenting hard labor. I wonder now if I let my imagination delve into this too much, and if my body decided to respond by letting me know how it might feel, and to see what life might be like without a functioning thumb.

As I began to write this, the pain in my left thumb was present but not overwhelming. As I wrote, the pain gradually subsided. Now, my left thumb feels almost completely normal and pain-free. So maybe this really was a psychosomatic pain, and writing about it exorcised it from my consciousness.