Today we will discuss hands and decision-making. As you can see, my right hand isn’t such a good hand. It doesn’t have much movement and it’s quite deformed. When I was injured, it was in terrible shape. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere. But there was one day where the medical team held me down, took a knife, and basically made multiple cuts along my forearm and each finger to release fluids that had accumulated. They were unable to put me to sleep because I was not in a good state. They told me it wouldn't hurt. Although it was badly burned and I’d lost a lot of sensation, there were still enough nerves that it was terribly painful. As a way to ease the pain, they had me countdown from ten. I was shouting by the time I reached zero. But when I hit zero, they still had more work to do. This was probably the toughest of all the painful scenarios I endured.
Eventually, they suggested I amputate it and replace it with a hook. They said the hook would be more functional since my hand wasn't, and still isn’t, capable of much anyway. I looked into it and they were correct. But I still couldn’t give up my hand. At the time, I didn’t know exactly how my hand would change even though I knew it wouldn’t be good. So I decided agains the amputation but invested in more surgeries and treatments to try to improve my hand.
The reality is that if I had decided to chop off my hand, I would have had tremendously less pain. Now, 70% my pain comes from this hand. From time to time I do think about how much pain I would have been spared if I’d made a different decision. The doctors suggested removing only my pinky finger and using the tendons to help with the rest of my hand. But again, I said no.
So I had these two decisions junctions: amputating my entire hand and amputating just the pinky. I decided against doing either. In retrospect, that was a mistake. I’m not sure it was 100% a mistake because I don’t know exactly what it would have been like if I’d had either procedure done. But deciding to keep this hand came with a lot of costs: lots of surgeries, treatments, and additional pain. At the time, I didn’t think ten, twenty, thirty years into the future. I didn’t think about daily pain. I assumed the pain would eventually go away.
If I'd known then what I know now, I'm almost certain I'd have chosen differently. But decisions like these are tough; once you make them, there's no turning back. Reflecting on these decisions, I realize how complex these choices are. Maybe this is an example of the sunk cost fallacy—the more you invest in a limb that isn’t functional, the more you want to keep it. Though I do think it’s also about underestimating the long-term effects over time.
So here’s to thinking carefully about our choices and taking into account their long-term effects. And here’s to also knowing when to cut things off that aren't working well for us—both metaphorically and literally.
