It wouldn't be a real trip to California without Ethan finding some new way to seriously injure himself. This time, Ethan fell asleep at the airport and gave himself compressive radial neuropathy, colloquially known as 'Saturday night palsy':
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https://archive.ph/HB8wA
By far the most common cause of this specific injury is being too drunk to correct your posture while asleep:
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12188953/
The absolute irony of losing the ability to stick out his thumb, out of literally
any possible injury, while halfway through a trip to see Faith Vickers is quite profound:
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View attachment 6565801
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557520/
Luckily for him, the compressive form of radial neuropathy almost always fully heals with supportive treatment and time (generally only the humeral fracture form is permanent) so he'll be back to sniffing awful things again in only a few months.