Keeping Control Over Your Body

Making medical decisions without expertise

I picked up a whisk broom to sweep a mess on the floor when a small piece of bristle broke the skin and lodged into my thumb. Annoying, but no big deal. A week passed and my attempts to remove the intruder failed. By now the thumb itself was swollen and purple and I wondered if I should go to a clinic or just wait for it to—I don’t know what, be absorbed into the rest of me somehow. Surely my entire body was big enough to handle this tiny intruder.

Photo by Nazlı Atabey Balkan on Unsplash

By the time I went to an appointment with Rose for a facial, I was concerned. Rose used to be an ICU nurse and she knew things. I told her I was worried about my thumb and wondered if I should go for treatment. She looked at it under her magnification lens and started poking at it with a sterile needle. “I think I got it,” she said, holding something up to the light. But then she frowned and said, “No, maybe not. Before you leave, let’s have Gary look at it just to be sure.”

Gary was her husband, an anesthesiologist. I felt lucky to have found Rose because not only was she really good at her job, but her services sometimes came with free medical advice. We went downstairs to talk to Gary, who examined my thumb. I was embarrassed to even be bothering him with this tiny problem that maybe wasn’t even a problem.

Then he said, “You need surgery. I’ll write down a name for you.”

“Surgery?”

My eyes got big. I looked from him to Rose who looked away. “I know I made a mess of it,” she said to her husband.

“No, you cleaned the skin away. It needed to be done. But if you want to be certain your thumb is not deformed, you should see a surgeon. If you just go to a clinic, I don’t know how good their skills will be.”

“Surgery?”

He wrote down the name of a surgeon he approved of, and I left in shock. It was a whisk broom. It was a thumb. I couldn’t possibly need surgery for that. I have avoided back surgery for thirty years and refused ankle surgery for a torn tendon. I sure wasn’t getting it for a piece of whisk in my thumb.

Driving home, I wondered how two smart people with medical training could have such differing opinions. Rose had been willing to just dig around and see if she could remove the piece of whisk, which obviously is what was causing the problem. Removing it made sense. Even though she wasn’t sure she’d gotten it out, she never mentioned surgery or further treatment. But her husband went full in with the most aggressive treatment we have: slicing in and cutting out.

Surgery has always seemed kind of archaic to me. Someday far into the future, I imagine we will look back and laugh about how bizarre our medical processes are now. Cutting into each other with knives and taking things out is weird. A bullet I understand. Maybe even a strand of whisk broom. But an organ or other body part we were born with? I can’t quite believe that’s the best solution. The trouble is, I don’t have any medical training or education, so I can’t argue against it. And apparently, even when you do have the training, that’s the best we’ve got. Surgery is the solution offered for many problems.

A lot of surgeries solve the initial problem and then come back to haunt you for the rest of your life with new ones. Then when you return for treatment, the advice is further surgeries. My late husband had had seven back surgeries over many years in an attempt to relieve pain caused from trauma in the car accident that killed his previous wife. One surgery was done just to remove all of the hardware installed in the previous operation by a different surgeon. There are lots of stories like his.

Mine was just a thumb, but I use my thumb a lot. Right now, it keeps hitting the space bar while I’m typing so all the letters here don’t run together into one huge word. It holds the back side of a pencil or paint brush when I’m trying to make art. It’s pretty important on a knife for chopping vegetables too. I wonder what a surgeon does if he gets a piece of whisk broom in his thumb. Do you think he’d trust someone else to cut it out, and that he’d then still be able to wield the scalpel for your procedure? Maybe their insurance policies restrict them from using whisk brooms. I’ve since learned to grab a broom or whisk by the handle above it rather than touching the fibers themselves.

I decided to do nothing after I left Rose’s that day. When I got home and looked at my thumb in my own magnification mirror, it already looked better. Apparently, she did get it all the way out because after about a week, I was completely healed. I’m glad I didn’t pursue surgery.

Liabilities

But every time I sweep something into a dustpan, I remember that couple, now moved away. I miss them. Rose was approaching my injury with the practicality of a nurse, and Gary was advising me from a different level of medical attention. Doctors have to assess worst-case scenarios just like lawyers do because if they tell you not to worry and it turns out you should have worried, their professional lives are over. So I understand that his opinion was never based on whether I should treat this, but rather where I should go for the best possible treatment. And as an anesthesiologist, he’d watched a lot of surgeons in action. He probably knew which ones had good hands free from their own injuries too, and which ones hit the bottle a bit too hard on the weekends.

In the end, we are the keepers of our own bodies. We get to decide what kind of treatment we want or to decline it all together. It’s hard to make good decisions when you have limited knowledge, but this is just one of the many things we are tasked with as human beings: making assessments in our best interests even when we can’t be sure what we’re doing is right.

It's part of this mortal life that’s scary and tricky and—when you get it right—kind of satisfying. Gather your information, listen to advice, but in the end, take care of yourself and remember your power. Thanks for being here and have a good week.