The Body Palette: Your Inner Rembrandt

The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, / The exquisite realization of health; / O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul.— I Sing the Body Electric, by Walt WhitmanThe CutSeveral years ago I sliced a finger joint right down to the bone, exactly where it bends. To be precise, that spot is called the distal interphalangeal joint — or the rather winsome “DIP” for short.To briefly explain what happened, I was slicing some sweet potato on a newly acquired mandoline slicer. The tool came with a guard designed exactly to prevent this type of accident, but I stupidly decided that I was sufficiently nimble to not need that protection. Clearly a bad decision.There was no pain. At least not at first. In fact, I didn’t even notice what had happened until I saw blood flowing down the mandoline and landing on the sliced potatoes. Red on orange.Delayed pain reception is a documented phenomenon — not something I want to…