I cut myself pretty badly the other day, worse than I’ve done in many a year. A sudden encounter with a brick wall took a chunk out of the skin of my right palm. It’s about the size of a 5 cent coin. Although it sounds bad, it didn’t hurt that much; possibly because my just-dislocated knee-cap was hogging my attention. But it has hurt since. A lot.

So, anyway, it occurs me that I can’t remember reading about this kind of thing in fiction.

I mean, there’s the odd wound that never quite heals (Rand al’Thor sustains one in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and readers are tormented by it for the next 8 books), but I don’t remember any writer dwelling much on the healing process.

Wikipedia, true to form, has a pretty interesting article on wound healing. It’s pretty cool to match that up with what’s going on with my hand right now. Like how the tight lines in the surrounding skin probably relate to collagen deposition and the early stages of epithelialisation.

What technology we have, right there in the palms of our hands! Neal Stephenson has it, in Cryptonomicon, that we’re all badasses because badasses are the only creatures that survive the process of natural selection. Douglas Adams points out, in an essay on his school years, that shorts are better than trousers, at least for children, because whenever we might invent self-repairing fabrics we have always had self-repairing knees. (Tell that to my knee and it just laughs, and laughs, and cries.) But I want to feel it, literarily if not literally.

I’m just saying. I’ll watch my hand heal itself, and think about what self-repairing badasses we all are.