Busted finger. Same old perspective.

Helping those who need it
London, ON
October 2020
This photo originally shared on Instagram

So the dog broke my finger.

It was an accident, and I'll leave the story of how a 15-pound Miniature Schnauzer can snap the right pinkie of a much larger human being for another day.

Suffice to say she didn't mean to hurt the guy who feeds and walks her before dawn and shoos those nasty rabbits and squirrels away from her favorite window. Suffice to say we love her more today than we did yesterday.

It meant a trip to the hospital, and another grand adventure for my old standby, Po the Teletubby. Taking her along was as deliberate this time out as it's been every time I've taken her anywhere over the past couple of decades. We were going to a place where smiles were needed, and a grown man toting a tiny stuffie couldn't help but make strangers smile. And it did.

I'll leave it at that for now, because when viewed through the lens of perspective, this is little more than a hiccup, and a minor inconvenience - a missed day of work, some lost sleep, slower typing speeds, and hilarious moments when I try to eat dinner.

And as I walked the pandemic-tension-filled halls of a place where health is never a guarantee, I was reminded, as I was when I spent large chunks of my childhood in another hospital that looked a lot like this one, that there was always someone else who was worse off than I was. That I should be thankful this was as bad as it got. That I had the privilege of laughing about my experience after the fact.

Because not everyone can say the same. Not everyone gets to post about it to Instagram or Twitter. Not everyone gets better.

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