Head Tale

It’s weird how much we take having two working hands for granted.

Since breaking my wrist at the end of July, it’s been a series of minor milestones – from my first appointment with my family doctor a few days after the surgery where he changed my dressing on through things like being told I could take my splint off for short periods of time to wash my arm to slowly regaining movement in my hand (again, something as simple as touching your thumb to your various fingers normally doesn’t seem like that big of deal until you can no longer do it.  And forget about snapping your fingers or playing a barre chord on a guitar!)

Anyhow, I still have a ways to go (I’d estimate I’m at about 75% of where I was before my injury) but I had a good follow-up appointment with my surgeon the other week and he said he expects that I’ll get back to ~95% of prior use (which is good because Dr. Google kept telling me I’d be lucky to get to 75-80% and there was also a chance my broken scaphoid might die due to poor blood supply in that area!)

It’s also funny how you don’t normally go around comparing notes with people about how much metal they have in their bodies but since my injury (especially when I was wearing my splint which I’m only doing minimally now), many random people have told me all kinds of horror stories of their own, often much worse, accidents.

• One person said she broke her leg when a group hug “fell over” and she ended up on the bottom of the pile.
• One person said his wife broke both wrists in a bike fall and that “was a test of our marriage vows for sure.  I told her, if you don’t want to see what I’m doing to help you in the bathroom, you’ll have to close your eyes I guess!”
• One person fell of a horse.
• One person fell off a 17′ high scaffold.
• One person broke multiple bones in a car accident.
• One person got stomped on by an opposing player’s cleats in a soccer game.
• One person had their thumb cut off in a woodworking accident and had to get wires and pins put in to hold everything together.
• One person said that while being x-rayed for a new wrist injury, the doc said “At least this didn’t affect your earlier break which is still holding strong.” and the person realised they’d probably had some minor hairline break since childhood they never knew they had until that moment.

I guess that’s my final thought – how lucky we are to live in the age that we do where you can break a bone (or bones), go to a hospital, have an anesthesiologist put you under (and hopefully revive you!), have a surgeon insert a piece of metal into you (not much different than how you might re-affix a loose fence board in your backyard) then give you pain meds, antibiotics for any complications and prognosis for a (near) full recovery with (again, hopefully) minimal complications.

Not that long ago, if say my grandfather fell off a horse or my grandmother fell on some ice or whatever, a more likely course of action would be to wrap the injured limb up, ice it a bit and hope that it mostly healed on its own without too much loss of use.

I can’t wait to see what medicine leads to next (though I’d prefer not to be the patient in future either if I can help it!)