Hands

Through my years I am amazed at how lucky I am to have my hands.  My hands have been through a lot, when fairly young I almost shot off my left pointer finger.  The bone was shattered, the finger nail gone, but after a short while it was back to mostly normal.  As life progressed and my desire to always work with my hands with wood working projects, hobbies or whatever I had many cuts and scrapes.

As I grew older I focused more on sales type jobs giving my hands a much needed repreve, signing documents and typing out contracts.  Then in 2001 my wife and I bought our second house, a spacious 4,400 Sf house that was very dated.  The day the house closed we demolished the walls around the kitchen, and took out the kitchen.  Over the next many months we re-built the kitchen, living and dining rooms all into one huge great room all the while I was working over 60 hours per week in Real Estate.  Throughout the next 7 years we continued to remodel that house and we were hooked on remodeling.  We bought and flipped a few other houses, meaning more cuts scrapes and scars on my poor hands.

At times I feel like the Terminator, where he is able to regenerate after seemingly impossible odds.  Yes it happens in the matter of a few seconds while it takes me a month.  But while tearing out our driveway I was pushing a large broken piece of concrete into the Backhoe bucket, unfortunatley I did not move fast enough and the 300 pound piece stopped when my hand hit the bucket of the backhoe.  Again it was my left pointer finger that was laid open by a jagged piece of gravel.  Not one to make a big deal out of it we bandaged it up and got the project done.  There is still a scar 5 years later, but as I said I am amazed at how well it healed.

My hands had no idea what I had in store for them when we decided to launch the RocLok.  From the chemical burns, to the bumps scrapes and cuts I keep stressing out my poor hands.  As time progressed I was able to find better gloves and save them from a little pain.  They still get stuck between a RocLok and a hard place, still get chemical burns and still are cut.  Just a month or two ago while working on a prototype part for the truck I am building, my left hand (again) got caught up in a router while milling some aluminum.  This was one of the more serious injuries I have had, I had to clean it up, get it ready for transport, and drive home because of course I was alone.  I was very lucky that the large vein was not ruptured, but laying just at the surface.  The doctor was able to close up the .5" X 3" hole, and 10 days later the stitches came out and amazingly it was mostly healed.

Having built a condo for people with disabilities, I never imagined I would be living here nor that I would need everything here.  I am still very lucky I know many people with amblitory issues and I could not imagine life without my hands.  No matter what I have done to them, they keep coming back for more and holding on till the end.  When I have a migrane I can release tension in my neck and reduce the pain, I can give Melanie a massage, I am building a truck, and making RocLoks. 

Everyone should be happy for the small miracles each day, be happy for what you have no matter how small and ignore all the bad stuff.  Yeah I have been hit by a car, lost my dog, grandparents, all my life savings, my house, and so much more, but at the end of the day I still am very lucky.  Look for the positive elements in life not the negative, life is a self fulfilling prophicy don't make yourself miserable, get out and enjoy life.  If you have the fortune to have two functional hands look down at them and realize how lucky you really are to be able to have 10 fingers moving independantly allowing you to things so much easier than many other people.