This past weekend the wife and kids were out of town for the Terry Fox run, giving me time to catch up on some housework, including replacing a sealed glass double pane. If you’re interested in more than the following description, go here.
Disclaimer: I don’t know the guy in the video, he just happened to be the first hit on YouTube when I searched, “sealed pane replacement.” I skimmed through his video and, yeah, that’s pretty much what I went through.
Thing is, the step wherein you cut the old caulking to release the glass from the window unit is not necessarily as easy as the YouTuber makes it look (heh, what is?). I don’t know if it was because I was replacing an old unit and the caulking had hardened, or the caulking was just different, but when I was cutting the panel free, it was HARD. Store that thought for later.
Anyway, I’d removed the old panel, and as I was unwrapping the replacement, I thought to myself, “Self, don’t cut yourself.” Whereupon I pretty much instantaneously sliced open my right hand from pinky, across the upper palm, to thumb.
I cut pretty deeply into the meat of my thumb, and almost to the tendon in my middle pinky joint. Fortunately all the damage, while bloody, was superficial. I cleaned the wounds, packed them with anti-bacterial ointment, bandaged up, got my work gloves, and got back to work.
Yes, I waited until after I sliced up my hand to get my gloves. I couldn’t find them when I was gathering my tools for the job, and since I haven’t cut myself replacing a window pane since the early 80s, I thought myself safe. Oops. I looked harder after the injury.
Anyway, I got the pane replaced, and spent the next couple of days keeping an eye on my healing cuts.
I’ve jabbered on here, a time or two, about the side benefits of correcting my posture and here I found two of them. One was, by now, completely expected. I told you to keep in mind that cutting the caulking to free the pane was hard work. Really hard work.
Well, when I woke up Monday morning, my right side, from shoulder to hip, was aching, enough so that I skipped Monday Pilates for Tuesday yoga. But, by the time Tuesday evening rolled around I was ready for a full, 90 minute Bikram class, and cruised through with no great difficulties.
Any exercise program will get your body used to working hard. Once it’s used to working hard, you body will recover from hard work faster. I’ve spent 5+ years working on my posture, and the muscles which support it, so that now, when I need those muscles for real life stuff, they’re up to the task, and recovery is pretty easy.
But what about the cuts? Well, one of the benefits of hard exercise is faster recovery, another is improved immune response. I suffered no infection problems in the cuts on my hand, and the cuts healed up fast enough that, deep as two of them were, the only thing I missed was a chance to go kayaking Saturday afternoon. Beyond that, life went on, as normal.
Thinking back to the last time I had a serious cut replacing a window pane, it took the best part of a week to heal. Exercising hard programs the body to repair itself faster, and this applies to injuries as well as simple workout soreness.
