ON ELBOW INJURIES...

About a month back, I was involved in a minor accident and injured my right elbow. I don’t feel compelled to go into the details of the accident, because if I do, I shall be digressing. Let’s just keep it to the fact that a motorcycle, a lot of stones, and a girl were involved. Well, as you might be able to well imagine, there was blood and pus, and a lot of pain, and also the hope that it would get well soon, which it did after all. And everyone lived happily ever after (me, obviously, but also all those members of my family who had to change my dressing every night.)
But, however, all those nitties and gritties aside, the point of this post is to bring to light how inconvenient it is to injure your right elbow (or your left one if you are a left-side-dominant person; or both of them if you are ambidextrous). For a period of almost three weeks, I was unable to bend the right hand, and what follows is a glimpse of what I had to go through:

· I was unable to brush my teeth, because my right hand could not reach my face. What I tried to do was brush with my left hand (which I was not very good at, and there was more froth on my nose than in my mouth), or not brush at all (which I could tolerate, but the rest of the world couldn’t).
· I was unable to eat comfortably, because (once again) of the same reason. To tackle this (my left hand was ineffective once again), I tried to master the art of dropping my food into my mouth from above at an arm’s length (it was a disaster, do not try this at home), or to find a spoon long enough to reach my mouth without requiring me to bend (such spoons are hard to come by, and using serving spoons is not comfortable as the spoon to mouth connection is not compatible).
· I could not write very well for a while. And I didn’t even try using my left hand for this purpose. I managed to solve this partially, by keeping my desk about two yards away from the chair. I could not type as well, but the same solution was applied for the computer table as well.
· I couldn’t soap myself, because soaping yourself requires you to bend the arm. The left hand was once again useless in this situation because it has never received much practice in the science of soaping me, and kept letting the soap bar slip out of its grasp and fall all over the bathroom, which became all the more irritating.
· The worst bit of the whole thing was that I was not able to change my dressing myself. This means that I had to rely on the magnanimity of the rest of my family to feel better. It was tough, for I had to keep all my opinions to myself and act very rosy and diplomatic for three whole weeks. Also, family aside, being unable to change the dressing means that you can do nothing if the wound suddenly decides to bleed and irritate you, and you have to wait till you get home before you can do anything about it.

I went through a lot more, but that would probably classify as ‘Too Much Information’. But the whole experience left me thinking with a great bit of seriousness, as to firstly why my left hand was so incompetent? And if it was, then why hadn’t I noticed and taken measures to resolve it?
The answer came sometime later, when I realized that my right hand had been altogether overused, and my left hand had not really been given room to develop. This maybe a similar case for a lot of people out there, and I’d appreciate it if all you guys learnt a bit from this.
At the end of it all, the injury came with a very important underlying message of striking a balance between the hands. And now, when I have healed and learnt, the whole episode doesn’t seem so painful anymore. Or is it because I can put my food into my mouth again?