June 12, 2020
When I was three and a half years old, I went crashing into a glass door on the first floor of my family’s home in Chevy Chase, Md. The worst damage was not from my arm going through the door, but from it coming back out. A shard of glass, still fixed in the door frame, entered my arm at the armpit and then, as I fell backward and down to the ground, it sliced open my arm all the way up to the wrist. I suffered complete severing of my radial artery, and total or partial transection of the radial, ulnar, and median nerves, and of various muscles.