Dead Arm

In shā’ Allāh, I’ll be travelling soon (sort of a Hāts ōn Tūr, I guess) and so yesterday I went to see my doctor to have the numerous vaccinations I need brought up to date.

All I can say is that I feel like someone’s given me a dead arm.

A popular pastime in school playgrounds, where a person (often a “friend”) knuckle punches you on your upper arm, leaving it feeling numbed, listless, and generally like you’ve been sleeping on it for the past five hours.

The practice was particularly rife at school after we were given our BCG injections. The scenario normally went: you come out of the nurse’s office, various people ask if you’ve had your BCG and then begin to punch you on the arm to aggravate it. *sigh* kids, eh?

So anyway, no-one has punched me on the arm (recently) but one of the two injections has given me this residual and annoying sensation.

I had two injections, one for Hepatitis A and another for Typhoid. They were administered in different arms (as I have two) but I didn’t bother to note what was going into which and therefore can’t figure out which vaccination gave me the prolonged dead arm effect.

Not that any of this matters, I mean al-hamdu lillāh in all circumstances, but what is a blog for if it’s not for typing the first thing that comes to mind of a morning?

And now for my Blue Peter tip of the day.

BCGs are notorious for being messy affairs, they tend to scab and if knocked can leave lasting marks (Everyone gets a mark but if the wound is repeatedly disturbed whilst healing it can be worse).

So if you know someone who’s about to have (or recently had) a BCG injection why not suggest this handy tip for protecting it whilst it heals?

When I was child, my father (Abū Abū Ilyās), came up with a solution that gives the BCG a protective barrier within which to heal.

For this you’ll need a plastic medicine spoon (they normally come free with cough medicine and the like).

What’s are the benefits? Well it allows air to circulate helping the wound to heal (by Allāh’s permission), stops the area getting knocked and helps keep water off in the shower (which I seem to remember being amongst the nurse’s instructions when she shoo-ed me out of her office).

It doesn’t, however, stop someone from punching you in the arm. To avoid this happening completely, you generally have to be the “hardest” kid school, a title that tends to be only given to one person at a time.