Patch

Have you ever seen the movie 'Patch Adams'? I watched it on Saturday night, and was left wondering about the guy in the psychiatric hospital, who always had his hand up in the air. What was his story? Well, today, I think that I have figured it out. I am pretty sure that this is how his life went:

After years of making his way through graduate school, he found his life energy being drained away by prep after prep of insoluble protein, nickel column after nickel column, miniprep after miniprep. Surely there must be a better use for my brain, he thought to himself. So, with a dose of inspiration and fortitude supplied by those around him, he rose up from the ashes and achieved the impossible: acceptance into medical school, a dream long ago abandoned, now come to life. Upon beginning at medschool, he found that it suited him exactly, and that this was what he was born to do. So, with his mind in Nirvana, and his soul floating through the clouds, one Sunday he went to play frisbee, and broke his left fourth metacarpal, with an ugly spiral fracture with displacement and shortening. As he sat at his desk post-plastic-surgery, wondering whether or not he would recover the feeling in his fingers and the full use of his hand, his friends made fun of his needing to continuously hold his hand high in the air, to avoid swelling. And so he remained, sitting in a stunned silence, his dreamy existence shattered, and his hand held high for evermore.

The only good thing that came out of the event for him was being able to watch the surgery on his own hand, with the skin and muscle cut away, to vaguely feel the screw entering his bone, and watch all his own tendons sliding up and down as he tried to open and close his fist post-op, with the skin all still pulled back.

That's my best guess, anyways.