If my hands were shoes, they’d be a pair of sturdy, old brogues. Not elegant, but perfectly presentable when tidied up, and excelling in utility. My long, slender fingers are bisected by knobby knuckles as wrinkled as elephant eyes. My thumbs are not much fatter than my fingers, and the joints of my left thumb are noticeably more mobile than those of my right—due, I suspect, to extensive violin practice at a young age, as the thumb is the hand’s moving platform for the instrument, while the other digits perform their gymnastics up and down the strings. I keep my round-bedded nails clipped short so they don’t get in the way, another legacy of violin playing, and polish-free because I can’t be bothered to maintain it. My cuticles are a mess.
The backs of my hands are veiny, like my mother’s, and in recent years slackening skin there has begun to bunch up into fine lines around skeletal landmarks, like elevation bands on a topographical map. I didn’t think it possible, but my palms are wrinkly now, too. A few small burn scars advertise my impatience in the kitchen, and in summertime, slow-healing scratches reflect the savage abandon with which I approach rose gardening—a new hobby that landed me in hospital for a night during England’s first COVID-19 lockdown, after a giant thorn injected me with some wicked bacteria. I’m considering falconry gauntlets for the next big prune. Not all my hand markings are accidental, though. Almost every day, I ballpoint-pen my top to-dos on the back of my left hand and reapply as necessary after handwashing. It’s been a habit since high school, and friends used to ask why I did it. “I’ll lose a piece of paper, but I’m not going to lose my hand,” I’d say.
I adorn my fingers from a small collection of chunky or sparkly rings, usually one on my right ring finger, occasionally one on my left as well. Sometimes I think twice about the left-hand one, as while I’m not on a mission to find a romantic partner, I am open to the possibility. But oh, horror of horrors! What if I meet some great guy and he thinks I’m married because I’m wearing a ring—that looks nothing like a wedding or engagement ring—on that finger? As if a very interested man wouldn’t seek to clarify my status, or I couldn’t make the first move, as I’ve done on occasion. I hate how much heteronormative BS I’ve internalized.
My accident scar is so thin and faint that it usually escapes notice. Once, while straphanging on the New York subway with a crowd of rush-hour commuters, I saw the passenger opposite me eyeing it. Noticing my gaze, he looked at me meaningfully, and I wished I could tell him I was OK, that the scar was not the result of a suicide attempt. The other visual evidence of my accident is also seldom noted. If I make a fist, then bend it down ninety degrees, you’ll see skin bunching up around the scar. That’s where internal scar tissue has tethered the repaired tendons to my skin, so that when they contract enough, they pull the skin with it. If you watch the underside of the wrist closely while I open and close my hand, you’ll see a few small lumps moving together, back and forth beneath the skin. That’s the scarring on the repaired tendons themselves.
I am a tactile person. If (global health emergencies allowing) we meet in a professional setting, I’ll introduce myself with a smile and a firm handshake, unless local custom dictates otherwise. If you are a friend arriving at my home for a party, I’ll take you lightly by the shoulders and draw you in for a kiss on either cheek. If you are an American friend, you’ll probably have pulled me into a bear hug before I think to nab you (I have become a bit more physically reserved after over a decade in Britain), but I’ll relish it and pat you on the back a couple of times when it’s time to part and find you a drink. Then in shared moments of mirth throughout the night, I’ll rest my hand on your shoulder, or we’ll stand arms around waists for a few seconds, while talking. I suffered mightily for the loss of such contact during the first sixteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’m not a big gesticulator in conversation, but my hands rarely rest. Even when working, one or the other is usually tensed over my laptop keyboard, or swiping Kindle pages, or gripping a pen in preparation to take notes on something I’m reading. In solitude, and occasionally in the presence of friends, I twirl my hair with my left hand in a precise and intricate pattern. I’ve done it since toddlerhood, as evidenced by a picture of me at three, standing in a red and navy bathing suit on some beach, with a thumb in my mouth and a hand buried in my bowl cut. I used to twirl with both hands—not at the same time, that would look ridiculous—but no longer, as my right hand’s sensory deficits make it no fun on that side (more on that below). I don’t twirl in response to stress, as my third-grade teacher suggested to my mother, but because it feels really nice.
Watching my right hand in motion, you’d think it typical in every way, and in some ways it nearly is. I’ve only minor deficits in strength, and my range of motion is excellent, the repaired tendons gliding smoothly and extensively, if not as independently of each other as tendons typically do. This means the fingers don’t move as independently, either. But having lived with the impairment for years now, I’ve concluded it will only pose a problem if I ever need to shoot webs out of my wrist like Spider-Man.
From a sensory perspective, my right hand differs vastly from its pre-accident state along the median nerve distribution. You know that buzzy feeling you get when your foot falls asleep after you’ve sat too long in an awkward position? That’s what most of my right hand feels like, all the time. Numb, but also like something. It feels the way white noise sounds, or the way on-screen static at the end of a television broadcasting day used to look.
My perception of external stimuli ranges from poor to intriguingly bizarre. For starters, I have very little light-touch sensibility. One result is that I don’t know I’m holding something thin and light in my right hand unless I keep my eyes or mind on it while gripping, which is totally unnatural, so I inevitably drop the object. With an impairment like that, you only have to lose your passport in the airport once before you learn to hold anything important in your more able hand.
Other mishaps due to lack of light touch don’t have such an easy fix, like the time I hopped on the London Overground to visit a friend in an unfamiliar part of town. Fearing I’d missed my stop, I wanted to look at a map before I’d gone too far in the wrong direction. The map being inconveniently located above and behind my head, I grasped my left knee with my right hand for leverage, and pulled my torso around from the hips in a good old yoga twist, to get a proper look.
When the young woman sitting to my left jumped in her seat and whipped right to glare at me, I realized I’d grasped her knee, not mine. You’d think I’d have noticed that my knee wasn’t feeling the grip of my hand, and promptly redirected the errant appendage. But apparently the knee sensation wasn’t the “motor mission accomplished” cue my brain was looking for. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” I gasped at the woman. “I don’t have any sensation in this hand, I swear!” I said, holding it up as if she should have been able to see what I couldn’t feel. The look on her face said she categorically rejected my excuse.
While I often don’t feel an immobile stimulus contacting my hand, however, I’ll register a moving one, like my cat’s tail swatting my palm, or a towel as I dry my hands. But I can’t discriminate texture; everything feels more or less like sandpaper. Whether a stimulus is moving or not, I’ll register its temperature, but I’ll perceive it as more extreme than would a typical hand. So a cup of coffee that feels pleasantly hot in my left hand feels unbearably hot in my right, and a cool brass doorknob feels downright cold.
I don’t perceive temperature immediately, though, which is dangerous because my skin can be damaged whether I feel a noxious stimulus or not. This quirk is the genesis of my brother-in-law’s affectionate nickname for me: Asbestos Hands. “You should be able to flip steaks on the grill without tongs, right?” he said once. Naturally, I accepted the dare, and it turns out that if I’m fast enough, neither human nor bovine flesh burns. Sharp stimuli present a similar difficulty, in that I often don’t perceive them until they’ve broken my skin. For obvious reasons, I’m less cavalier about this issue than delayed temperature perception.
Localization of stimuli on my right hand makes me laugh, when it doesn’t make me cuss. That’s because I feel whatever is happening to my hand in median nerve territory both at the true locus of a stimulus and in random patches all over my hand. For instance, if I squeeze my first fingertip, it feels as though the top half of my hand is in a vise grip. Poor localization is no problem if a finger gets wet, but it’s annoying if a finger gets pricked, and it sucks if a hangnail gets inflamed. That can keep me up at night.
Sometimes I don’t know exactly where my fingers are placed on an object—maybe due to poor localization, wonky proprioception, or both; it’s impossible to say. Once, eyes on my Kindle, I attempted a lusty bite from the sandwich I was holding in my right hand and got a mouthful of my own digits instead. I hadn’t known my fingers were so close to the mouth-edge of my sandwich, or that implicitly knowing where your fingers are on a sandwich is key to safe mouth placement. Damn, human incisors are good! Though overkill on an egg-mayo sarnie. Now, I always look before I bite.
In addition to making me more vulnerable to physical injury, these sensory eccentricities render me somewhere between hapless and hopeless at tasks requiring fine dexterity—tying shoelaces, screwing jar lids on, opening crisp packets, finding correct change in my pocket, and the like. Fumbling at sex like a novice made me realize just how much fine dexterity it involves. But it’s not really the sort of thing you bring up when your hand therapist says, “What else do you need to be able to do?”
At the root of all these issues lies a seriously weakened central/peripheral nervous system feedback loop. With my median nerve delivering poor information about the location, nature, and intensity of stimuli in my environment, the central nervous system struggles to craft appropriate motor responses for my hand. “Garbage in, garbage out,” as a former boss used to say, explaining how poor briefing led to poor work product. Why is this the case? I’m going to call it Murphy’s Law of Peripheral Axon Regeneration: Everything that could have gone wrong—and, remember, the list of possibilities is very long—probably did, to some degree.
If true, then my median nerve now transmits less environmental data, because some axons haven’t regenerated, and those that did regenerate transmit data more slowly, because they are less well-insulated than a pristine axon. The median nerve also transmits a distorted mix of environmental data, because axons transmitting about different types of stimuli (thermal, mechanical, chemical, etc.) did not regenerate with similar success. And then, the transmissions themselves have changed in format, and the central nervous system must learn how to interpret them. This requires the remodeling of trillions of connections between neurons, as well as between peripheral axons and their target cells; for reasons neuroscientists still don’t understand, this doesn’t happen fully or well.
But I’ve truly buried the lede here, which is that one way or another, I can do everything I need to. Sometimes a task just takes modifying to perform effectively. For example, I can manipulate writing and eating utensils perfectly well if I hold them between the middle and ring fingers of my right hand, instead of my index and middle fingers the way I used to. That works because I have a bit of light-touch sensation in my ring finger, whereas my middle finger is completely numb.
I now lock and unlock my front door with my left hand because I can’t feel the give and take of the lock mechanism through the key when I’m holding it in my right hand (yeah, there’s a special sensory receptor for that) and couldn’t find a way to overcome that deficit. But because my left hand hasn’t had the benefit of a lifetime of motor babbling with a key ring, it’s not great at the job, either. So I get a little lesson in patience, coming and going from home every day.
When modification doesn’t work, I allow more time to struggle through a task (please don’t hold my coat for me; it takes me ages to feel my way into the right sleeve if I’m not holding it myself). Or I delegate it to other people. A big shout-out to all the women colleagues who have lent their sensory receptors when I needed necklaces, left-cuff buttons, and dress zippers fastened.
Even when my right hand can do a mechanical job, I’ll use my left if texture is the point, like when I want to appreciate the rough bark of some ancient tree my mates and I pass on a country run, or the soft, nubby yarn my mother chose for the cowl she knit me last winter. Caressing and hair tousling are left-handed tasks, too; they’re meant to bond, and their power seems diluted if they only generate pleasing outbound sensations.
Alas, led by my left hand, such tactile experiences still don’t feel as rich as I remember them being when led by my right. And as I recall, my right hand was always better than my left at this kind of fine-texture discrimination. I suppose a dearth of motor babbling is implicated here, too. Do I miss having a fully receptive dominant hand? Do I miss the pleasure flood of perceiving the richest, most lovely tactile sensations in stereo? I didn’t, until I started exploring the matter for this chapter. Ah well, I’ll get over it.
While I’d once feared discovering some meaningful activity that my impaired hand prevented me from doing, deep into one of England’s severe COVID-19 lockdowns, I found instead that I could do more with it than I’d ever hoped.
Worn down by isolation, and throbbing with anger and grief about the pandemic, and about corrupt politics and deadly racial injustice roiling in America, I was working hard to maintain emotional equilibrium. Running, meditating, and video chatting with loved ones offered some relief, but not enough. Then, during one of those “I have no right to complain, but . . .” conversations so frequent at the time, my friend Gadi suggested some self-care I hadn’t considered.
“What are you doing for fun?” he asked. It felt slightly indecent to consider fun while the world was on fire. But not being Jesus, I’m well aware that my suffering doesn’t reduce anyone else’s, and by golly I wanted to reduce mine. I mentally sifted through a heap of recent time, tossing aside all the ugly bits to find moments of communion, kindness, and pleasure. The thought of them briefly warmed me, but nothing I unearthed even approached the lighthearted, rejuvenating experience of fun. Aside from writing this book—which, given the subject matter, was also often emotionally taxing—everything I was doing counted as coping.
“Nothing,” I replied. “There is absolutely no fun in my life.”
“That’s a big problem, Becca. What are you going to do about it?”
A few weeks later, I took my first online Scottish fiddle lesson. Researching the genre on a whim, I’d discovered more than enough reasons to give it a try. A lot of Scottish fiddle music is written to mimic bagpipes, whose whining, melancholic drone I’ve always loved. It also benefited, by association, from my fondness for other Scottish products, including a good friend who helped make London home for me, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the campy Highlander movies, and die-hard Scotland football fans who wear kilts to matches. The matter-of-factness of the tune names, like “Mrs. MacLeod of Raasay” and “Jenny Dang the Weaver,” really crack me up for some reason. And most important, as a folk-playing rookie, I wouldn’t mind sucking at it.
My classical violin technique was surprisingly easy to coax out of retirement, and has proved useful in learning fiddle, as both types of music are played on the same instrument. Also, I needn’t have worried about my right-hand impairments. The alternative bow grip Connie suggested initially felt awkward, but it feels so natural now that my hand automatically assumes the shape of it when I reach for my bow—and my wobbly pinky doesn’t set me back as much as I thought it would. Many expert fiddlers don’t even touch their little fingers to the bow. I still drop it sometimes, and so far, I can’t help making a slight crunch sound when changing bow direction on the lower strings. But my teacher says the sound is a sought-after characteristic of “dirty” Cape Breton fiddling, and I choose to believe her.
Fiddle music is rhythmically and melodically distinct from anything I’ve ever played—pulsing, hiccupping, noodling, and swooping in ways that continually defy my expectations; riddled with tricky syncopation; and embellished with finger-snapping “cuts,” bow-shivering “birls,” and other funky ornaments that have no classical equivalents. So I’ve got my motor babbling cut out for me.
An even bigger challenge is learning what’s not on the page—the spirit of the music that makes it folk, and Scottish, which someone growing up in Glasgow or Skye would have absorbed from the language, culture, and landscape in which they’re immersed. When I’ve got bow well in hand, I instinctively play with a Western classical music sensibility, which is characteristically smooth and precise—not at all what the gritty, foot-stomping jigs, reels, and strathspeys that I’m learning want. Imagine an opera singer belting out Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and you get the picture. But I’m starting to catch the Scottish groove, and learning the music is a delight. In applying myself to it, I’ve also pleased Connie and Dr. Vargas, both instrumental in enabling my new passion in their very different ways.
I live in a modest, outer-London borough, in what might best be described as a mews, except that the small Victorian row houses are arranged on either side of an overgrown common garden instead of pavement. I practice fiddle standing in front of my bedroom window, which overlooks my postage-stamp garden, the common garden, and my neighbors’ houses opposite me, mirror images of my own.
There’s always something to watch while I practice. An amazing array of birds flock to our trees and feeders throughout the day—including, depending on the season, city pigeons, wood pigeons, magpies, crows, robins, jays, starlings, sparrows, tits, blackbirds, parakeets, and goldfinches—while gulls, swallows, and the occasional peregrine falcon shriek above. My neighbors walk by with workbags, baby strollers, and grocery sacks; their small children chase each other up and down the walk; and their well-fed cats dot the gardens, mostly preferring napping to bird hunting. When the humans disappear, bats swoop in, and urban foxes trot around looking for carelessly bagged rubbish to raid and scatter about.
I practice with the windows open when it’s warm, and the resident seven-year-old is my biggest (perhaps only) fan. She’ll wave up to me, rope her friends into a little dance-off if I’m playing something jaunty, and occasionally make requests. “We have to bury a snail. Can you play something sad?” she asked recently. I complied with “They Stole My Wife from Me Last Night,” an eighteenth-century tune that is sad indeed, if the referenced event really happened.
For my own pleasure, I keep coming back to “A Happy Day in June,” a lilting contemporary tune by Lauren MacColl that rocks gently back and forth across the strings, asking mostly for sweetness but also for a satisfying bit of digging in the lower registers. It accompanies my bedroom view like a good movie soundtrack, drawing attention to what matches its tone, brightening even a bleak-weather day. My fingers know the music now, so that when I play it, I mostly forget myself. When intermittently aware, I feel whole, and a part of everything.