Off, damn'd cast! off, I say!

as most of you know, i was involved in a little collision with the grill of a landrover while on my bicycle (well, corina's bicycle...corina: i hope you are using mine! we will find you a peugeot when i return!) shortly before i commenced this little round of globe-trotting. the result: a scaphoid fracture in my left wrist that while teeny tiny looking on the ct scan images, can cause chronic arthritis and other painful things if it heals incorreclty, so they tell me. so, the short of it is, i am backpacking in a cast. my orthopeadic genius told me not to do any heavy lifting for the next six weeks...this is fairly impossible, given my current lifestyle.
my EBI electromagnetic stimulator has stopped charging, perhaps due to some confusion about voltage on my plug adapter's part. this was a crazy thing i had to wear to bed at night to stimulate bone growth...when i wore it around the airport everyone was looking at me strangely, until i realized that with its boxes and cord it must have looked like a bomb strapped to my belt buckle and took it off. i cannot tell which is more unfortunate, the fact that i can't use the thing until i get back or the fact that i have to lug around its ridiculous weight unneccessarily.
it was high time i did some laundry, seeing that my clothing situation is very limited and i have worn everything multiple times, and i realized that i couldn't even handwash it with the handy sink-sized detergent packets i packed, so i had to drop it at a laundry facility yesterday. i am sure they will charge me the arm i couldn't use to wash it myself, and a leg, too.
another thing that has become a little harder is typing, because there is no flex in the wrist and plastered thumb always hits the space bar when it shouldn't, so please forgive any typos and grammar mistakes i may have made in the past and the general hurried nature of some of these posts (not only have i been writing with a very minor handicap, but also often on a budget, since until imatra it was all done in internet cafes, and they charge by the minute).
one doesn't tend to shower as often as normal when backpacking but when one is confined to tiny and unusual showers already, the extra trouble of trying not to get the cast wet is slightly unwelcome. my hair has become more of a bird's nest than usual from washing it with one hand and not combing it...there is definitely a dread forming in the back. oh well. yesterday it rained and my cast got a little wet (and i got a lot wet). all i really wanted to do was pop it out of the sleeve of my raincoat and hold it under the downpour and watch the plaster strips disengage from each other and slip onto the sidewalk...but instead i had to deal with a soggy, sticky thumb for 24 hours. my thumb has been prepetully pruny for the past three weeks, goddamn thumbs, thumbs goddam you! as devendra says.
opposible thumbs are a miraculous part of the human anatomy, and one that we may bring up in discussions of evolution but we tend to take it for granted most of the time. my thumb isn't even injured but since it has been stuck in place i have really, really come to appreciate it (and hey, now i am a perpetual optimist and could hitchhike easily, if i wanted to...and use the cast as a weapon, if i had to). but of course, even in wielding cameras and backpacks i have learned to manage almost normally without my left thumb; humans are such adaptable creatures.
all of this complaining is meant in jest, a little peep into the minor comedic trials of my condition. before i left, when i was shopping for a travel tripod at adorama, the jolly old cashier inquired about my injury. after telling me he lived in my neighborhood and the hasid ambulance would have been there in thirty seconds (if i were part of that network), he asked me the date of the accident. july 2, said i. said he: then you must henceforth make the independence holiday a long weekend for yourself, and spend the 2nd in particular reflecting on your life and giving thanks that you still have it. i thought that was kind of amazing. not only do i have my life, but it is good, extremely good at the moment,a nd i do give many many muchos beaucoup thanks.