Never Been a Scab Picker

I have never been the type of person to pick or pull off scabs, yet last night I found myself in the position of needing to pull off a rather thick peice of dead skin on my index finger from a bad cut last week. The dead part was pretty embedded in the good part of the skin on the finger below the cut, no way was it going to fall off on it's own like I had been counting on. It was either that or let it get ripped off from getting caught onto something and risk it tearing just a hair too low and creating a new injury.
The whole experience reminded me of when I had surgery on my thumb. After surgery, once every few days, I had to go to my hand surgeons office for him to clean it and redress it and eventually tug a little dead skin off parts of the skin that were ready to get "removed from me". I never looked at it when he did it. I often got an accidental glimpse here and there, since it was in front of my face propped up on a table, but I would quickly look away. I went to physical therapy three nights a week with that thumb and again, I would follow directions, but always look off, as if my thumb had really nothing to do with me.  Somehow that kept me from just totally freaking out about it.
One day I came into the doctor's office knowing it was the last time he would undress it, I was expecting to see my old little thumb scarred, but outside that perfect.  Instead it was a large mass of thick layered strange fake-looking skin. It reminded me of my Halloween costume when I was five and went as Planet of the Apes. The doctor begin ripping and pulling away large folds of my thumb and laying them on the table. I screamed. He laughed and told me he knew it didn't hurt, it was just a strange sensation.  I agreed but I didn't like the idea of so quickly losing large peices of myself. I told him I screamed because it was a "sympathy pain", like if I see someone hit their elbow, I flinch for them, for a brief second I imagine their pain. He said "oh, you're one of those." As he continued to pile up my skin on the table he explained to me that people like that (me) don't get anywhere in life. If it doesn't hurt , don't work myself up into a reaction, and for God's sake, if something happens to somebody else don't stop to burden myself with imagined pain. He told me he thought I was smart and I should finish school and stop trying to save the world, I needed to save myself.
I never really figured out what all of that meant to me, although I did go by his office the following Christmas and dropped off a card. It turned out he was Jewish, but he still said thank you and had one of the office girls tape it up by the sign in desk. I always feel like something is undone with me and him. Like there is some kind of private internal polite war we were having and I never figured out my last move to share it. I do that often with people. I write about it all to myself later and end it all with me saying something really cool and somehow I won.  I think I just walked away from this one, and I think I am still figuring out if I have a stance or I should take the advice.
 And the main thing I wonder about him, is what did he do with my skin. Should I have let him just throw it all out? Growing up in the South you see a lot of older woman keeping their hair that fell on the ground at the salon--for one thing the beautician "may do something to you with it" or for another thing if the beautician tosses it out in the trash and it hits the ground birds could peck at it and cause horrible headaches to fall upon you. I am sure I have nothing to worry about with my hand surgeon, he didn't seem the type to run off with my skin to "do something with it", it just bothers me I left such large portions of myself in that office that I had known my whole life.