Surgery Day--March 2
Feb. 14th, 2009 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jinjiforeMy surgery is scheduled for March 2, two weeks from Monday. I am very pleased. :)
It seems as though everything is going to go pretty much as I described in my earlier post. I'll be in a cast for about two months, then I'll have to have a second surgery to remove the pins. After that, it will, hopefully, be merely a matter of recovery and physical therapy.
The negatives:
I will almost certainly lose around 30 percent of my range of wrist motion, permanently. I've been doing physical therapy to give myself as much flexibility as I can beforehand, so I'll have more to lose. But there's no getting around that I won't be able to flex up and down as much as before.
The good news is that 90% of most normal activities (knitting, typing, writing, for instance :)) can be accomplished with a fairly narrow range of motion. So long as I can flex my wrist to a 60 degree angle forwards and backwards, I shouldn't experience much functional impairment.
The second downside is that the surgery probably won't completely fix the pain. The wrist joint has so many different components that it will be nearly impossible to restore perfect interaction between them. The scaphoid and lunate bones are probably never going to align just right, so I'll probably have to put up with a certain degree of long-term pain. It might not be much, and it will certainly be more bearable than my current circumstances, but I'll have to wait and see.
So, okay, I'm a little freaked out, a little depressed. Don't get me wrong, I feel very fortunate that this is a (mostly) fixable problem and I feel pretty optimistic about the future. But this has still not been my best two months ever. Partly it's frustration from not being able to do much that's useful or fun, but mostly it's because I've spent every single freakin' day with my wrist hurting like hell, and it's only gotten worse over time. I know I'll have a lot to cope with once the surgery's done, but to be honest I think I'll do my coping once my definition of a good day moves on from "didn't cry from pain" (without also meaning "spent day stoned on hydrocodone").
Okay, done whining now. I hope. :)
In the meantime, I've cheered myself up with a little self-pampering: painting my nails. So far, they have been wine-red, purple, orange and chartreuse. (My toes are pink and sparkly, but I assure you that it wasn't self-inflicted. I merely point to this as evidence that I love my daughter. ;))
In closing, I'd like share an exchange I had with the stewardess on the plane I took from Wyoming around the first of the year:
Stewardess: Did you hurt your arm skiing?
Me: Sadly, no, nothing that exciting. I fell on the stairs.
Stewardess: Oh, dear. Are you right-handed?
Me: Yep. And, of course, my favorite things to do are knitting, crossword puzzles and sudoku puzzles.
Stewardess: Have you taken up drinking?
It seems as though everything is going to go pretty much as I described in my earlier post. I'll be in a cast for about two months, then I'll have to have a second surgery to remove the pins. After that, it will, hopefully, be merely a matter of recovery and physical therapy.
The negatives:
I will almost certainly lose around 30 percent of my range of wrist motion, permanently. I've been doing physical therapy to give myself as much flexibility as I can beforehand, so I'll have more to lose. But there's no getting around that I won't be able to flex up and down as much as before.
The good news is that 90% of most normal activities (knitting, typing, writing, for instance :)) can be accomplished with a fairly narrow range of motion. So long as I can flex my wrist to a 60 degree angle forwards and backwards, I shouldn't experience much functional impairment.
The second downside is that the surgery probably won't completely fix the pain. The wrist joint has so many different components that it will be nearly impossible to restore perfect interaction between them. The scaphoid and lunate bones are probably never going to align just right, so I'll probably have to put up with a certain degree of long-term pain. It might not be much, and it will certainly be more bearable than my current circumstances, but I'll have to wait and see.
So, okay, I'm a little freaked out, a little depressed. Don't get me wrong, I feel very fortunate that this is a (mostly) fixable problem and I feel pretty optimistic about the future. But this has still not been my best two months ever. Partly it's frustration from not being able to do much that's useful or fun, but mostly it's because I've spent every single freakin' day with my wrist hurting like hell, and it's only gotten worse over time. I know I'll have a lot to cope with once the surgery's done, but to be honest I think I'll do my coping once my definition of a good day moves on from "didn't cry from pain" (without also meaning "spent day stoned on hydrocodone").
Okay, done whining now. I hope. :)
In the meantime, I've cheered myself up with a little self-pampering: painting my nails. So far, they have been wine-red, purple, orange and chartreuse. (My toes are pink and sparkly, but I assure you that it wasn't self-inflicted. I merely point to this as evidence that I love my daughter. ;))
In closing, I'd like share an exchange I had with the stewardess on the plane I took from Wyoming around the first of the year:
Stewardess: Did you hurt your arm skiing?
Me: Sadly, no, nothing that exciting. I fell on the stairs.
Stewardess: Oh, dear. Are you right-handed?
Me: Yep. And, of course, my favorite things to do are knitting, crossword puzzles and sudoku puzzles.
Stewardess: Have you taken up drinking?
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-19 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 08:33 pm (UTC)Sorry you have to go through something like this, but atleast it isn't as bad as it could have been.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-19 07:46 pm (UTC)And you're right, it really could have been a lot worse, and all things considered I feel very lucky. I think my downitude is mostly pain-induced and once I get the surgeries over (and don't have to take five or six Lortab every day), things will look up. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-19 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-19 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-19 07:55 pm (UTC)