Can you see it in the picture? No?
Look again! No, no I'm not reading fortunes in coffee cup froth.
Can you see it now? Still have no idea what I’m talking about?
The line on my nail. Not that noticeable right? First time I noticed it, I tried to wipe it off thinking it was pen ink. It didn’t go away though. Then I looked at my nail closer and realised it wasn’t on top of my nail at all, it’s INSIDE my nail.
Thinking back...I didn’t remember injuring my nail by closing a door on it or anything like that, so what’s up with the funky line in my nail you ask.
After two days of trying to ignore it thinking it would go away, I finally took the matter into my own hands and headed to old faithful. No, I didn’t go to the family GP, don’t be ridiculous, it’s the fucking 21st century. I headed over to Google of course and well, it’s not great. You see I’m probably dying.
I’ve joked about this with friends before about how you have a tingling sensation in your ear and Google tells you you’ve probably got some weird tropical disease that’s transmitted by earwig saliva and you’ll likely die. You got a skin rash from the heat, you’re definitely going to die. Well I have a line in my nail and yup, you guessed it. I’m probably going to die.
So what the fuck is the line in my nail because now I just know that you really want to know. It’s called a splinter haemorrhage. Cool name I know.
Apparently these things can be the result of injury to the thumbnail bed but we’ve already ruled that out. They can also appear due to the formation of tiny clots under the finger nail. Great. That’s never a fucking good sign.
Oh but wait – there’s more!
Splinter haemorrhages can also be a symptom of a heart valve infection. Fucking not kidding you. It’s called endocarditis. Every wondered why all the funky doctor words end in “it is”? Do you think that was done intentionally as a play on words? Anyway I digress.
Fan fucking tastic rice in a poop scoop. Well, like I said earlier, I could be sitting here with a nosebleed and it would also probably tell me that it could have been caused by an aneurism so I’m not going to jump ship into freaking out just yet, BUT on the other hand, I also recently had Covid so who knows. One thing I’ve learned is that if you ever want to find out what’s actually wrong, it’s still the safest bet to just go to a doctor because Google is really shitty at giving you a prognosis nicely. He’s a blunt mofo and gives you all this technical jargon with endless number of links leading you down a rabbit hole of dispair and suffering. Oh and by the way, it could just be that I bashed it while moving stuff into my storage area and didn’t even notice I’d hurt it.
Sometimes I really do think that having all this information at our fingertips (see what I did there??) is a little bit of accessibility overload, on steroids – and not the good kind. So now you know that I have a line under my nail and that there’s simply way too many conditions with a main side effect according to Google of "you’re probably going to die".
I’ll take my chances with the line in my thumbnail, thanks.
