The Princess and the ???
You've probably heard the story of The Princess and the Pea, written in 1835 by Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen, about a prince whose royal parents wanted him to marry a real princess. Apparently, in Fairy Tale Land, the only way to tell if a girl is really a princess is to stack up a whole pile of mattresses on top of a single pea and, if the girl feels the pea through all of those mattresses, she is the genuine, real deal.
I'm no princess, but lately, I'm beginning to understand what that miserable night must have been like for the girl in the story. My misery is usually only momentary, while I grab the offending object from the top of my solitary mattress, where it has deposited itself under my sleeping body. Sometimes, I'm careful to not wake Bill, but other times, let's just say my single-mindedness may cause us both some distress.
I'm not in the habit of sleeping with peas. Instead, I wear four finger splints each night, in hopes of keeping my arthritic fingers reasonably aligned, or at least straight enough so I can continue to play my guitar and type my blog.
It's probably been eight or nine years since I saw the orthopedic surgeon who informed me that, even though I have "very bad" osteo-arthritis, surgery is not an option. Instead, she suggested I wear finger splints in an attempt to keep my fingers straight(er). She pulled out a whole box of splints, found the right sizes for the fingers we targeted first, and showed me the correct way to wear them. She also suggested that I could tape them on if necessary.
At first, I dutifully taped the splints onto my fingers every night, but it was a hassle, for sure, to wrap the tape around each splint with just one hand. Removing the tape each morning was even harder. Eventually, I found that the plastic splints stayed on my fingers pretty well without tape, most of the time.
So, most mornings, I wake up with at least three of the four tapeless splints intact, right where they are supposed to be. A quick search usually finds any missing splints on the nightstand, where I may have deposited them during the night if they were pinching my swollen fingers; or they might be on the floor, or next to me in the bed.
But there are still those occasional times when I wake up suddenly, with a single splint poking some part of my body. That's when I fling back the sheets and roll over, in an attempt to snag the annoying device without turning on a light.
The girl in the original story proved to be a real princess, of course, just because she tossed and turned the whole night long, all because of a single pea at the bottom of an impossibly high stack of mattresses. There are nights when I wish that a stray splint would magically turn me into an arthritis-free princess, or even a commoner, for that matter. But, for now, I thank God for these low-tech finger splints that are doing their job quite well. Without them, my fingers would be useless zigzags.
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