Mr. Rawles,
In many of your posts, and the posts on other sites, I see a recurring theme to practice with weapons using your “off-hand”, but I don’t see this same advice put out for any other activity.
All right, so a bit of background: I’m a pretty hard-wired preparedness guy, I prep, I practice, and I thought I was pretty well covered for just about anything until just recently.
I was at work and while transiting from one area to another I slipped and slammed my hand in a large steel latching mechanism on one of the blast doors in our facility. Now, I didn’t have an ice pack available, but the temperature was pretty low, so I just took my glove off, cursed a bit, and went easy on my hand until I got home.
Fast-forward to the next day when ice packs, elevation, and compression have done nothing to ease the swelling or pain, and I figured “Maybe I should see a doctor about this.”
Turns out, I had broken the second metacarpal in my right hand (the bone in the big part of your hand connected to the index finger). Now here’s the bad news, I’m right hand dominant, and the cast they put you in for that sort of thing immobilizes your index finger, middle finger, and wrist. Plus it tends to get in the way of what little grip you do have with your ring finger, pinky and thumb. Also, even though the cast is fiberglass, the padding can’t get wet, so you have to try to keep the whole thing dry.
Basically it renders your right hand useless. And that’s where the lessons started:
At first I thought that other than slowing down my typing, I’d be good to go. I was wrong. You see… turns out pretty much everything is built for right-handed people. Want to start your car? Cool, be ready to lean in to the passenger seat so you can reach the ignition to turn the key. Want to use the pen pocket on your jacket? Too bad, it’s on your left forearm. Want to get something to eat? All right… open up a can. Wait, the can opener takes two hands to run (one to hold it closed, one to turn the crank). Okay, Plan B… use the can opener on your Leatherman…. Huh…it’s set up so that if you try to use it left-handed the body of the tool gets in the way. Fine, just use the darned thing upside down. Well, crud! Now how do you hold the can still? (hint: it involves sitting on the floor with no shoes on.)
And the list goes on and on; now I have practiced shooting off-hand, and even reloading and like one-handed… but it had never occurred to me to try to shave left handed, or tie my boots with one hand, or make dinner one handed, or for the love of all that is holy in this life, open a jar one handed.
In this case, there was no real emergency, just a huge inconvenience for me, and a good deal of cheap entertainment for my friends. But had this been a critical situation, I wouldn’t have had the luxury of time to get the learning curve smoothed out, or the ability to just run down to the store when I broke half my glasses trying to wash them.
So what did I learn? I learned that I should always plan for the eventualities. In a bad situation, a mechanical injury to your hands or arms is a distinct likelihood. And even the short term, partial loss of use of a hand is a huge limiting factor; more so if it is the dominant one. Meanwhile taking a little extra time out of your day to do something like shave with the other hand, or open a pop-top soda can one handed, or even just cut an apple with the “wrong” hand will give you valuable insight into your own abilities (or lack there of) and will help to reinforce the skill should you need to use it.
And frankly, I’d say it would be time well spent. – Jim S.