Physicality: Part 2

The last time I was in this much pain I think I had my wisdom teeth taken out and I had a bad reaction to the drugs and threw up, causing dry sockets in both sides of my mouth to form: basically raw holes where the teeth use to be and the throwing up caused the healing to break open and raw-ly expose the holes. Now, after four days of bottling, my fingers have gone completely numb. I have my two pointer fingers taped with Band-Aids, and then taped on top with at least two layers of  adhesive tape for some extra padding, but the pain is still there. Underneath, the skin is chapped and raw, the muscles never been used to quite an extent before. On Friday, the fourth day of bottling, we started at 8:30am, an hour later than usual, and worked until about 4:45pm. By the end of the day, I thought my fingers would give out and I would drop the bottles. I winced every time I had to pick them up, four at a time. But the work continued and the bottles kept coming out and I endured. I had no choice. I couldn’t even use my fingers in an embarrassingly useless effort to scratch my back. If there’s such thing as buff finger muscles, that’s what I’ve got.