Because the back half of my arm was unsupported, I haven't been able to use it for anything. Not so much as hang a towel from it without incurring undue pain. The other day I really, really wanted to go for a run, as the sun was shining and the roads dry and I have been doing nothing since the accident. But even movement caused me pain, so no run. Pretty pathetic. It drives me crazy not being able to help my wife and family around the house. I'm not someone that likes to sit around and be pampered.
This morning I went to see Dr. Jurist and check progress, I was pretty excited. The office was very busy, but I finally tore myself away from a 6 month old Newsweek magazine was led into an exam room. A nurse used scissors to cut off my bandages, revealing a long scar with 25 stitches. She asked me to lay my arm down to remove stitches, but first I took a picture!
So you might think it looks kinda gross, but I haven't seen my arm in almost two weeks and I was pretty happy to see it is still there, and in fact it has absolutely been thriving under all of those bandages.
Before the nurse took any stitches out, she led me into X-ray to take some pictures. It just doesn't get any better than this, I was hoping and praying I could get an x-ray to see what had happened! Dr. Jurist saw me in the x-ray room and stuck his head in, "you're going to love these pictures!" he exclaimed. I'm pumped now!
Back in the exam room the nurse took out a single stitch, then Dr. Jurist came in and said he would do that if she would fetch the pictures, we're excited to see them. I didn't say much as I was counting: 25 in all. The doc joked that he probably could have done it in less, but wanted me to have a good story to tell.
I've been flexing my fingers a lot every day trying to loosen them up, and the doc is pleased. I can't do much with the thumb, but the bandages prevented me from moving it. Hopefully I'll be able to wiggle around more with the cast on.
Now we get to see the x-rays:
So the first and most obvious thing is that I didn't get retractable claws. I expressed my disappointment to the good doctor, and he apologized. Still, look at the way dem bones line up, pretty impressive! You can see the titanium plate and screws in the lower part of the arm, and the pins coming off of the plate in the upper. I also notice that the plate has an interesting cut out in the middle: it looks for all the world like a bottle opener. I have no idea how I'm going to get to it to open a bottle, but I appreciate the thought.
You can see in the picture that the bones are not knit, but they are in nearly perfect alignment and things are starting to fuse. Actually, the bones could only be aligned better if they were held using zip ties, I'm convinced that is a patentable idea.
The doc is very pleased with how things worked out. He says these plates are sort of a new thing, they used to have to really open the arm up in order to put the necessary supports in, and now it's all pretty simple. Just in time too, he says he was getting too old to be cutting on people like that.
Dr. Jurist thought it was cool that I was taking pictures of everything, so we threw the original x-rays up for easy comparison:
This picture was taken before the initial reduction, so you can see that the top of the Radius is pushed way down and the hand is out of place. Now that I've been looking at these for a while, I realize how messed up it was.
The doc told me that often at this point they often provide a removable splint, but given the severity of this break they will cast it for 3 weeks, then we'll go to the splint. I was able to chose from a number of cast colors, but they were all varying shades of ugly. I decided to go with black, it goes with everything.
Notice that I have a lot more finger showing. Yes, I can finally type with 2 hands again! It isn't completely natural as you typically twist your wrist to contact the keyboard, but I've typed this entire blog entry in roughly the time it takes me to do a paragraph or two! I feel like lightening on the keyboard, comparatively speaking.
In exactly 3 weeks from tomorrow, I go for my next exam. They will remove the cast at that point and put on a removable brace. I'm still 6 weeks from starting physical therapy and regaining my full range of motion, but it's clear I'm making progress. The doc says I'm probably about 8 weeks from getting on a bike, but it's something we'll be watching. Evidently he had a patient last year who had the same operation and was able to do the Mt Washington hill climb
four months later. Cool! I've already missed registration for the hill climb this year, but wasn't planning on racing it anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment