Contracture//Conjecture

Writer-ish Prompt #190: Write about an ending.
Full disclosure: I didn’t stick to ten minutes. more like 20. And it feels like there are more depths to plumb on this topic.

Something is ending, but I’m not quite sure yet just what.

You see I recently was diagnosed with a genetic condition called Dupuytren’s Disease, or, more creatively, Viking’s disease (despite the distinct lack of such interesting lineage). For now, it is a simple but foreboding node on my right palm, a small omen of what may or may not be. Put simply, this unending mosquito bite is a lump of collagen that has worked itself into a frenzy and hardened, a natural process gone awry. This bump could stay exactly the same forever, a permanent but ultimately inconsequential protrudence.

Or, it could not. The fibroblast, to call it by its full name, could expand into a cord. That cord could eventually begin physically contracting the skin of my palm to the point where my finger(s) would begin to curl in spite of their and my desire to stretch outwards. At that stage the typical treatment is surgery, the skin and cord beneath carved a curious zigzag to release the contracture.

The lines of my palm, in this case, reveal nothing as to the future of their own potential for normalness or gnarledness. It is conjecture - though it seems likely to me - that the hobbies I’ve carried with me since childhood and returned to as an adult (rock climbing, gymnastics, flying trapeze) have curved fate and genetic’s arrows towards contracture. It is also conjecture that ceasing such activities at the cost of my pleasure may change this trajectory now.

Those hobbies may end, or they may not; I’ve yet to weigh the scales and decide whether the ends of my pleasure justify the means of my palms. I write these words with a recent steroid injection still permeating the nodule’s fibers in hopes it may soften, or ease the fires that come with trying to climb or fly or tumble. What is ending, however, is my ability to do those things without the literal and metaphorical scales burning and looming under my skin and behind my eyes. My old relationship to those hobbies is gone, and I’m left to build a new one, node by hardened node.