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I’m reading Chapter 8, “The Human Touch” of Irish physicist Laurie Winkless’s book Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces.
In
2014, I was doing a spot of gardening at the entrance into my house.
The Virginia creeper growing along the wall had covered over the gate
pier and was threatening to swallow the gate as well, so it was time to
get it back under control. I started to cut it back with a secateurs and
after a few minutes of snipping, I ended up on autopilot: snip, pull
back, snip pull back, while thinking about other things and losing
concentration. I lost visual contact with the secateurs under a clump of
vegetation just as a car blew its horn on the road. I looked up while
doing one more snip, and felt a dart of sensation, but strangely not
intense pain. (Like those stories of people having their leg bitten off
by a shark and not being in agony straight away). Realising immediately
what I had done, I was terrified of looking down to see what damage I
had caused. “Luckily”, I had only cut a piece off the tip of my
forefinger the size of half a baked bean, Gross alert! (which I
recovered later that day). I went into survival mode straight away. I
wrapped my finger in kitchen towel and made my way down to my GP’s
clinic. They said they couldn’t do anything with it, and gave me a
letter for A&E. Someone gave me a lift into Naas Hospital and after a
short wait, an emergency technician dealt with the wound. First they
gave me several anaesthetic injections in my finger (not pleasant) and
then irrigated the open wound (which was equally unpleasant and
uncomfortable). Maybe it hadn’t fully kicked in, but the anaesthetic
only seemed to work on pain nerves and not all the other types of
sensors and nerves in skin that are sensitive to touch, temperature,
pressure etc.) To cut a long story short, my finger totally recovered
after a few weeks and even though I had completely lost the top of it
and the fingerprints, it magically regrew, complete with prints. It’s
still a little bit sensitive when I touch things (with a slightly
uncomfortable sensation like when you hit your “funny bone”, presumably
due to raw nerve endings), but not something I consciously think about.
In the chapter of Laurie Winkless’s book about skin, we learn how it’s
a sense that’s unappreciated in its complexity and ability to detect
many different sensations. We can also detect roughness on surfaces only
a few atoms thick and fingerprints apparently have “roots”, which allow
them to grow, luckily for me.