I was doing shoulder presses with 25-lb. weights, and I
wasn’t very careful in replacing them in the weight rack. Instead of placing
them properly, I managed to crush my fingers between the weights and the metal
ridge of the rack. Within seconds blood started to stream out of my left and right ring fingers, so I headed to the
front desk for some first aid.
As I sat there waiting for the desk attendant to put his
gloves on, I watched the blood begin to roll down my hands. The cuts didn’t
hurt much at all, so my thoughts freely drifted. Looking at the unexpectedly
large amount of blood (it wasn’t a great deal more than expected, but enough to
be noticeable), I began to wonder if the fact that I was lifting weights right
before cutting myself—using hand and finger strength to grip the dumbbells—was
making me bleed more than I normally would. Though I simultaneously felt like
an idiot for being so careless, this hypothesis made me feel a little proud.
I’m not very scientifically curious, as a rule, so it was nice to catch myself
theorizing without being prompted by someone else. I decided to check into the
increased bloodflow idea later that day.
Later that day turned into a few weeks later. Either I
wasn’t that curious, or other matters
took priority—probably both. Nevertheless, I finally began searching the
internet for information, soon finding some answers from sources that appear credible:
"Blood flow through tissues is
matched with the metabolic needs of the tissues. During exercise, blood flow
through tissues is changed dramatically. Its rate of flow through exercising
skeletal muscles can be 15 to 20 times greater than through resting muscles."1
Image
by Chris Aldridge.
As science writer Craig Freudenrich explains,
"As you exercise, the blood vessels
in your muscles dilate and the blood flow is greater, just as more water flows
through a fire hose than through a garden hose. . . . As [the chemical
compound] ATP gets used up in working muscle, the muscle produces several
metabolic byproducts. . . These byproducts leave the muscle cells and cause the
capillaries. . . within the muscle to expand or dilate. The increased blood
flow delivers more oxygenated blood to the working muscle."2
Next I decided to learn a bit more about specific muscles in
the hand and fingers, but I quickly discovered that in fact there are no
muscles in the fingers.3 When I first read this I wondered if it might be one of
the many “crazy facts” lurking on the internet that are just crazy, not factual. Further investigation, however,
confirmed that the muscles that help move the fingers are located on the hand
and forearm.
This makes me doubt my original hypothesis, because I was
bleeding from the fingers. It was the lower part of the finger, so it makes
sense that increased bloodflow to my hand muscles resulted in abnormally high
bleeding nearby. But for all I know, what seems like proximity to me is
actually remoteness on the level of capillaries, and the increased bleeding was
simply illusory. Or caused by something else entirely.
What other factors cause bloodflow to increase? Do any other
body parts besides fingers operate in a remote control-like way? I use the
phrase “rabbit hole” in this post’s title because one empirical observation can
create a never-ending chain of questions. I like that. The humanities scholar
Barbara Herrnstein Smith (who at first studied chemistry in college, actually)
has written about literature, “The completed work is thus always, in a sense, a
temporary truce among contending forces, achieved at the point of
exhaustion...”4 With scientific inquiry, too, one eventually has to
stop somewhere, at least for the moment.
This can be frustrating when the desire to know, to understand, persists beyond our energies. But the idea that there’s always another question to be asked is bracing. None of us will ever reach the final answer of any line of inquiry. There will always be another question. And because we’re human, we’ll always make mistakes—like smashing our fingers with dumbbells—that set off the whole process.
1. Rod Seeley, Trent
Stephens, and Philip Tate, “Blood Flow Through
Tissues During Exercise,” Anatomy and
Physiology, 5th ed., McGraw-Hill, accessed April 27 2013, http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/ap/seeleyap/cardio/reading4.mhtml.
2. Craig Freudenrich, “How Exercise Works,” Discovery Fit
& Health, accessed April 27, 2013, http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/diet-fitness/exercise/sports-physiology8.htm.
3. Apart from the
tiny muscles that form goosebumps.
4. Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
“Contingencies of Value,” The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed, ed. Vincent B. Leitch
(New York: Norton, 2010), 1810.
