Scars...

When I was in middle school I cut open my index finger pretty deeply. It healed up okay, though I still have a noticeable scar there today.

Visually and otherwise.

When I lift weights if the grip I use puts weight on the scar (most of the time) I get this odd sensation. It's not quite painful, but it's not really pleasant either. It's like when the nerves grew back they had a hard time connecting over the scar so they sort of loop around on themselves. Feels like a little electrical hum in there. Not great, but not really painful.

For a long long time the prevailing theory was that cut nerves never grew back, then they realized that they actually do.

But the challenge is that they take a really long time to do so, and even when they do sometimes they don't come back exactly right.

Like my index finger.

My ring finger on the same hand was lopped off at the top and then sewn back together when I was (I think) 4. I know it had to be before I turned 5 because my oldest brother was living at home so it could have been as young as 3 or as old as 4. Anyway... the whole top of the finger was cut off and only hanging on by the smallest bit of skin. They reattached it, it grew back together with a little bit extra (the nail bed on that finger is a totally different size, I probably got a quarter inch of extra finger out of it?) and there is no difference in the nerves for the scarred area and the rest of the finger.

When I got the nerve damage in my right hand from the bee sting it took a long time for most of the feeling to come back. There was no cut, no severing of the nerves like that, just nerve death from the blood poisoning. For a long time I could have stabbed that fat pad in my palm and never felt it. Now I have feeling back to probably 99% of my hand. There is a small area on the side of my thumb that is still numb, but it's really small now.

But that index finger, it's a trip. Just a reminder all the time that though it's better, it's never going to be the same. And it took a long time to get to that point. And at 45 years or so after the initial injury this is probably the best it will ever get.

Somethings can only heal so far.

I wonder what the lasting damage of this administration will be. I wonder how many decades will pass and we will still be feeling the ramifications of it all. I know that the first step is to stop the damage and the best shot we have of at least slowing it down is this November.

Will we ever get to a point where it's all okay again?

In my lifetime? I'm going to say no. I'm going to say that if things go spectacularly in the next few elections and we are able to stop the damage, and then start to repair and replace the broken systems and processes that maybe, maybe before Katie dies there will only be old scars that can be seen if you know where to look.

I mean, there are still so many things that started with Reagan that are just now showing the complete rot that was set in motion. Hopefully we can do a reverse of that and the next administration can be the one that people say, "Oh yeah, that's when the repair started."

Wouldn't that be nice?