The hand and elbow doctor was right when he said that I wouldn't like the dynamic splint.
It finally arrived two days ago, delivered by the local rep for the company, a very nice fellow, well-spoken and clear, who trimmed and padded the damned thing on the spot to suit my atrophied right arm.
Maddy the Occupational Therapist gazed with il- disguised lust at his single tool, a pair of what looked like ordinary stainless steel scissors.
They turned out to be $30 Italian scissors, apparently favored by people who work with casts and plastic medical fittings.
They did make nice clean cuts in the 1/8th inch plastic without much effort.
(I watched with interest, since I'm having a hard time just pressing fingernail clippers with my enfeebled right hand.)
The splint is a simple V-shaped contraption. You lash your arm into it with some velocro straps and buckles with your elbow point down in the middle and turn a knob to spread or close the V, stretching or compressing the reluctant arm.
There are three problems so far.
First, Maddy worries that my sensitive flesh is not getting along with the padding because it leaves red marks on my skin.
My suggestion to put some plastic wrap over the offending padding was cruelly dismissed on the grounds that it would trap moisture and cause even worse problems. (I was tempted to tell her that I have vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals, but I fear that she's too young to remember what Butch Cassidy said in the movie.)
It may just be the pressure, not true skin irritation.
Second, I'm supposed to find time to do 6 30-minute sessions every day, with 45 minute intervals between each session, three stretching and three flexing. Doing a pair before and after breakfast, lunch, and dinner might work, except that I also have to find time for 45 minutes of leg exercises and 30 minutes of dumb-bell exercises with my good arm.
(Maddy was horrified when I dug up an out-of-date set of instructions that recommended wearing the damn thing at night while asleep.)
Third, the whole scheme relies upon the simple and intuitive notion that I can tell when things are stretched far enough, but not too far. Both the rep and Maddy repeatedly warned me not to over-do it, just enough to stretch things alittle.
So I'm somehow supposed to know how far is far enough.
This reminds me a little of Adam Diment's spy-hero Philip McAlpine's comment on a learn-new-languages-effortlessly scheme that was supposed to teach him fluent Russian in his sleep: the evaluation suggested that "either the method, a French importation, was grossly over-rated or else McAlpine, P. was an idiot."
Either the dynamic splint's tension-level is harder to figure out than advertised, or else Maddy is writing in her chart notes that Fogel, C. is an idiot.
Ten more minutes until I can take it off.
