Joe Bennett: Splinter extraction experience a lesson in anatomical magic

The splinter was too small to see but its breach of the curtain wall had been detected and a signal sent which registered as pain, writes Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

I felt the splinter enter. I'd taken a log from the log bin - gum is notoriously splintery - and as I went to open the log burner I sensed a tiny stab in the pad of the forefinger on my right hand.

(Oh, busiest of fingers, that forefinger. Where hasn't it been these 64 years - for better or for worse? It has taken an interest in everything, gone ahead of me at all times. It's led a more vivid life than I have.)

The tiny stab of pain was a warning that the castle of my flesh was under attack. How impressive the warning system is. The splinter was too small to see but its breach of the curtain wall had been detected and a signal sent which registered as pain, not at the point where the signal was received, but at the place where the breach occurred.

Here was an unconscious self telling a conscious self of danger and showing it exactly where to look. I don't pretend to understand how any of this works.

Having passed the information on, the unconscious self left it to the conscious self to attend to it or not. Had the breach been more serious, a stabbing, say, or the top of a finger gone, it would have insisted with a torrent of screaming pain until the conscious self responded.

But for now the life of the two selves was not threatened, so the unconscious let it drop. ( I say"the two selves" but who is the self commenting on the other two, the self writing this? Is it a subset of the conscious self or actually a third self, a sort of superintendent self? Answers on a postcard, please, addressed to all of us.)

Anyway, the priority at that moment was the cold, so I carried on bringing in logs and set a fire and lit it and sat a while to watch it take hold - an activity so atavistic that it gratifies all selves abundantly - and then I went to make a cup of coffee. As I gripped the handle of the kettle I felt once again the prick of the splinter. A reminder from me to me.

I couldn't see any splinter, but I squeezed the spot with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand, to no effect. So I nibbled at the skin with my teeth, also to no effect. So I gave up and made coffee.

The next time I noticed the splinter, the area around it had turned a little red, presumably the effect of defensive juices manufactured and supplied by the immune system without my conscious knowledge. But they did not repel the intruder and eventually, after repeated reminders, the conscious self decided to operate.

Whichever self is in charge of the finer motor skills of the left hand has been derelict in his duties. With a dressmaker's pin for a scalpel, I went at the skin of the right forefinger with the precision of a drunk. On a minuscule scale, I picked and hacked and lifted and every now and then a sharp sting announced that I had sunk the blade deep into my own flesh.

Even with glasses on it was all too small to see, so I relied on the unconscious self and its defences to tell me how I was doing. Further evidence of the unconscious self's defence work was a droplet of pus.

I squeezed. There was a little blood. I sucked and squeezed. Nothing. I dug on, rootling in my own flesh. As the unconscious self kept at its million tasks - breathing in and out, regulating muscles to keep me upright, maintaining the organs, receiving and reacting to the constant flow of evidence from the senses, keeping me awake (whatever that means) - my conscious self applied the whole of its attention, every morsel of its tiny bandwidth, to the eviction of a scrap of foreign matter weighing perhaps half a gram that had somehow wormed its way within the precincts of my 93,000 grams of self. And failed.

Surgery failed. Squeezing and sucking failed. But they left a hole behind and overnight the unconscious self, the king of all things, went to work. By what mechanism I can't tell you, but somehow, while the I that I think of as I slept, it eased the splinter out and then sealed the skin behind it, so that now, this morning, when I press the spot I feel no sting. We are made whole again. And I know nothing.