Last Wednesday, I had a really great climbing session with Tio Dave at ET in Timonium. They were setting a bunch of new boulder routes and I quickly sent a couple of the new unrated problems. It’s always fun to do that as it is a “no limits” kind of night. You might try something that is v9 but you’d never know because there is no official rating. Also, there was NO ONE there so we felt like we had the place to ourselves.
The bummer came towards the end of the night after trying some “easy” routes that were setup by Jason Kehl. I say “easy” because they were only rated 5.10 but were damn hard and took a few tries to figure out. I don’t think it was anything in particular that I did… I never heard a snap or a pop or anything. It didn’t even hurt much during the evening but the next morning my finger was swollen and hurt like crazy when I curled it in to my palm. It’s an old-school injury from when I was just out of high school rearing its ugly head again (at least, I’m pretty sure). It’s a fracture of the right index finger right at the big knuckle where the tendon from the palm pulls on the knuckle. It just ends up pulling a little chip off the bone which then floats around and hurts like crazy.
I’ll find out for sure on Wednesday when I have my appointment with the hand specialist. In the meantime, I’ve splinted my finger and I’m not climbing. What a drag. I’m not sure what I could have done to prevent this from happening again. This is the 4th or 5th time it has happened now. All from playing one stupid game of basketball in high school gym class and getting my finger jammed. I hate that game.
Update (12/21/07): Nothing conclusive came up with the doctor visit. The swelling went down after 2 days and after a little time off things felt great. I climbed again on 12/18 and again on 12/20 with no pain. Not sure what happened but I’m happy to say things are just fine as of now.