Saturday a week ago, I tested for my red belt with black stripe in my self-defense class. One of the things we were tested on was board breaking with knife ridge hand technique. I was nervous the board wouldn’t break and I didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I gave it my all. The board shattered into three pieces with wood dust flying everywhere afterward. I went home and iced my hand.

Wednesday night, after we received our new belts, we had red man training. That’s where a guy puts on a fully padded suit–that’s red–along with a protective helmet and pretends to attack us while we learn to escape.

At one point, when he attacked me from behind, my instinct had me aiming a palm heel strike straight to his nose. Unfortunately, the pretend bad guy had that protective helmet with its steel cage face mask on. My hand slammed into the steel bars with all my strength.

I put ice on my hand throughout the rest of the night, but nothing seemed to help. I was certain I’d cracked something if not outright broken a bone. I have a high threshold for pain and this was pretty bad.

I went to the doctor the next morning and she sent me to get x-rays. They came back negative. Nothing broken, but massive amounts of soft tissue damage.

As the swelling has gone down, more and more of the actual bruise is visible.

It still hurts, but I’m doing better. I now have beautiful shades of black, blue, yellow, green, and purple all mixed together. With my entire right hand out of commission Wednesday night and Thursday all day, and my thumb out of commission Friday and most of Saturday, it’s certainly been hard for an author to be an author. Thankfully I didn’t injure my wrist any worse than I did and I’ll be back to writing each night after homeschooling all day soon enough.