Your skin is known as your integumentary system. It's up there with nervous and cardiovascular as systems go. You would do well not to disrupt or lose it.

I ruptured mine the other day against a fireplace, a burn that actually hissed for a brief moment before my nervous system kicked in and pulled my hand away. Word on the street is that such signals don't even go all the way to the brain -- a sharp bolus of pain like that only needs to go so far as the spinal cord before the message comes back: withdraw offending limb and evaluate. I beheld an open blister on the back of my hand with a thin rim of char that was probably the residue of the metal surface I touched, not a fried sample of my own tissue.

Ice stabilized the small wound. There was little left to do but glory over it, the way we tend to do with minor injuries.

I kept my hand bandaged and double-gloved on my ambulance shift, assuring it would have no contact with undesirable bodily fluids. Someone puked in my face instead. Leave it to the world to discover and overcome your defenseless perimeter. There is nothing you can do, while bearing a cot with a patient on it who has just vomited on you, but keep up the good work and look for a towel at the earliest opportunity.

Susan was looking through a pair of binoculars this weekend, trying in vain to track the flightpath of a predatory bird, when she nearly looked into the sun. Sara and John, who must be more expert binocular users than we are, managed to intercept her visual path before she could blind herself. I had a brief moment of awe at the way that simple instants can alter a life. Had Susan been blinded, even partially or temporarily, it would have changed things considerably. I momentarily beheld that alternate future spinning off our own into an indistinct silence that is reserved for nightmares.