Anchorage Daily News

MANITOBA MOUNTAIN -- The human hand has 123 ligaments, 48 nerves, 34 muscles, 30 arteries, 29 bones and 29 joints -- give or take a few -- and we take them all for granted most every day.

Or at least we do until things go wrong.

Watching an aging ski buddy repeatedly snap his cold hands downward in an effort to get enough warm, fresh blood into the muscles to allow them to work on a frigid November day, I couldn't help thinking about how only a year ago I gave some serious thought to having one of my own, near-useless fingers amputated.

I would not have been the first. Musher Lance Mackey from Fairbanks had his left index finger whacked years ago. It had become lifeless due to nerve damage associated with cancer surgery. It was fine cosmetically, but functionally worse than useless.

When you're changing dozens of booties on the feet of dogs everyday, a popsickle-stick-like index finger does nothing but get in the way. Mackey came up with a quick, easy and musher-practical sort of solution in 2005. He had the finger surgically removed.

He won his first Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race that same year. He followed that by again winning the cold, challenging, 1,000-mile marathon from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada, in 2006 and 2007 and 2008.

And then, of course, there were the victories in 2007 and 2008 in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the Superbowl of mushing.

It's almost enough to make one think a single finger is a small price to pay for better digital dexterity, which is pretty much what I was thinking while struggling with a badly swollen and uncooperative trigger finger a little over a year ago.

At its worst, that failing right finger forced me to use the middle finger to snap the safety off on the shotgun when duck hunting, and while the situation never quite deteriorated to the point where I had to use the middle finger to pull the trigger, things were getting close. The trigger finger was on the verge of becoming a near-dead piece of muscle and bone just getting in the way.

The wet and the cold, as opposed to simply the wet or the cold, was especially problematic. The trigger finger would succumb to the elements long before the other fingers started to go numb, although they can all become useless sure enough if subjected to enough cold and wet.

You've never really experienced October waterfowling at its wet-snow-slushy best until you've struggled back to the truck at the end of a difficult day only to be forced to hold the key between the palms of your hands because you can't wrap your fingers around it even after jumping up and down in the parking lot for five minutes trying to shake warm blood down into uncooperative digits.

Things went better this fall, when way too little time was spent in the field, but the prospects for that trigger finger remain discouraging.

The journal Arthritis and Rheumatism just recently reported that people with index fingers shorter than their ring fingers (that be me) face higher risks of osteoarthritis. The study out of the University of Nottingham in England found an almost two times greater chance of knee and hip arthritis and an increased presence of arthritic finger nodes.

And to think that for a long time I was blaming my hand and finger problems purely on past encounters with frost-nipped fingers while working on snow machines in the cold, or failing to pay attention to the extremities while skiing or hunting or climbing or fishing or, for that matter, working outdoors.

Frost nip has been shown to have a cumulative effect, i.e., the more cold injures you suffer the more you become susceptible to cold injuries.

Don't I know.

Desk riders that we tend to be, we scribes don't usually face many risks on the job, but I managed to frostnip the fingers one year while covering the Iditarod. Taking notes with a freezing hand, instead of sticking the hand back into a mitt to warm up, was a stupid thing to do, but it might not have all been my fault.

Biology, it is becoming increasingly clear, is to some extent destiny, and that long ring finger mentioned above hasn't been linked just to arthritis. It has also been tied to higher testosterone levels.

And we all know about higher testerone levels.

They make males more aggressive than females, more confrontational than females, and more likely to take risks -- both big and small.

Your average male, I can assure you, often doesn't think about the risks.

Or at least he doesn't think about them until he is into his 50s and his hands aren't working so well anymore because of years of abuse, and his hearing is going bad from decades of subjecting his ears to the unmuffled roar of high-power engines, and his body in general feels just sort of beat up from the cumulative injuries associated with those friendly male sports like hockey, football and fighting.

The body pays the price of the nonthinking. We are, when you think about that, not much different from our machines. Take care of them and they will last a long, long time. Abuse them and they can wear out relatively quickly.

But you really don't notice all that much until they start sputtering or stop working altogether.

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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