Watching A Blister Heal

Summer just started here, and to convert the patch of fallow sod that used to be a garden into a garden once again, I've been using some larger hand tools for a change. It's the same process of discovery as with razors -- for me anyway, as I refuse to avail myself of public education on the subject, which is relatively easy to find.

The long-handled spade is my preferred instrument. If the horse-drawn plow were a safety razor, this would be the straight. I can turn the earth without any technological aid, certainly not a gas-powered rototiller! It's the hoe that kicks my ass every time. Just not a natural instrument at all, for me. At least I wasn't swinging it like an axe this year, just using it to break sod apart from the larger clods of earth. Still, my hands took some damage, the worst blister on my non-dominant thumb.

I let it ooze and crack for a day, then covered it with a band-aid to go about my business among fellow men without revolting anyone. But that evening, again exposed to the air, it was oozing and cracking, being poorly situated near the largest knuckle joint of the hand. Hurting, I turned to the pumpkin juice-icle I use for shaving, inspired by the hot pain of inflammation. But, once there, I considered that people would put aloe on such an injury, and I do regard the pumpkin juice as similar in function.

The response was remarkable and immediate. I went back to the freezer a couple times. Before my eyes, the parts of the sore that still had recognizable skin structure, dried up and developed a scabby brown patina. Ooze still welled up from the deeper split, though it also crusted over, so on the second application I held the joint flexed for a few minutes. And that was it. The wound was dried and closed, the inflammation subsided, and the pain was gone.

The blister provided a macroscopic model of why pumpkin juice is a natural aid to declamation, and really shouldn't be called an exfoliator. If you unzip the cadherins holding the skin cells together, all manner of infiltration is facilitated in the wound, and in shaving, individual corneocytes can fly, fly away. If they remain locked, the wound has to split under the contraction of otherwise healing fibrils, and in shaving, the skin is also split under tension, with corneocytes departing in chunks.

Why did I not use pumpkin juice in my second-in-a-row BBS shave? That was an error. I had hoped witch hazel would pick up the slack, but this stuff is special.