On the one hand, an appointment looms with the elbow surgeon in two weeks.
Barring a miracle with the arm-stretching splint, he'll suggest surgery to remove pesky internal scar tissue, cut a few uncooperative ligaments, and extract some bone fragments that have worked loose, all in hopes of making my right arm straighten more.
I admit that I don't look forward to this, but it's probably the best option, since the arm now straightens only about 45 degrees.
Right now I could blend in with the ladies waving their arms here around 0:39:
***
On the other hand, I'm enjoying the gym routine of slowly standing up, letting go of the helpful left-hand hand-hold (a 4-legged half-walker), and standing on my own two feet, albeit one leg has a brace. It doesn't hurt and isn't tiring.
I also enjoy the slow and tedious processes of transferring by myself between bed, wheelchair, and commode--no more waiting for up to two hours to be hoisted by crane.
There's even an actual exercise now, sitting for five minutes in a strange sort of stationary bicycle whose pedals go back and forth instead of round and round, so I pull back on a lever with my left hand to return the right pedal (the bad left leg and bad right arm are idle).
It helps to imagine the Tour de France at 4:30 and sprint for the last thirty seconds.
Best of all, Matt the Physical Therapist ventured a guess that I may be walking in three or four weeks, as opposed to merely standing up and sitting right back down.
Being right-handed with unblemished skin, I feel out-of-place in this medical den of left-handed tattoo-parlor enthusiasts.
Twice a day, a cheerful new CNA wraps the blood-pressure cuff around my unmarked arm, slips a pulse-oximeter over my finger, and swipes the new-fangled thermometer across my forehead.
(I seem to have low blood pressure and rarely reach 98.0F, much less 98.6F. I may be hibernating.)
The CNA scribbles my vitals on her clipboard with her left hand. A right-handed CNA here is as rare as a right-handed first baseman.
Meanwhile, I try to memorize her name in case she rotates back through my wing of the facility. It's no use trying to recognize her by the tattoos on her forearms, since almost all of my CNA's have murals of ink art from wrist to shoulder.
These ubiquitous CNA tattoos would give the facility a faint air of a Marine Corps boot camp--
If the tattooed drill sergeants were forever asking hopefully if there's anything else that they can do for the recruits--
And if the non-coms were all left-handed and far more attractive than usual.
In contrast, the Therapist tribe scorn tattoos and asking if they can plump my pillow. They act as if they can barely contain the urge to demand that I drop and give them twenty. And they're all right-handed.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
Last edited by carlfogel; 07/15/202110:49 AM. Reason: subjects & verbs should agree
I saw your post on the other thread about how difficult your dynamic splint sessions are, and thought that I would post here in your blog. I am sorry for what you are going through, it is a seemingly endless recuperation . . .
I’ve got that ellipsis now! Although, I again missed our friend, the hyphen. You can continue to pass the time by tutoring us in our forgotten English.
I do hope the board helps to pas the time. I note that you have helped several posters with their IT problems. Shall we come up with more dilemmas to keep you engaged, and your mind off that hellacious splint?
Seriously though, if there is any way for us to assist you, please let us know. We are all rooting for your recovery.
Let us not dignify my punctuation quibbles as "English" . . .
Although I'm tempted to warn against misusing a comma to divorce a subordinate clause from its conjunction.
More seriously, thanks for your good wishes.
***
As for my wretched dynamic splint, I shouldn't complain.
A friend has revealed that when he broke his elbow a few years ago, he ended up sitting across a table from a husky physical therapist, who simply grabbed his arm and straightened it for fifteen minutes every session.
I don't dare mention this to Maddy the Occupational Therapist because I don't want to give her any ideas.
Although Maddy is slender and attractive, she is also about six-foot-four and might break my arm.
That’s wonderful news! I have been wondering how you were doing since you had not updated us in a couple of weeks. What a long ordeal you have been through, it must feel great to be in your own home. Are you able to care for your dogs, are they with you? I hope so.
I just found time, embarrassingly enough, to read the beginning of this thread. And I'm trying to watch my English/grammer/and punctuation, and syntax. (bad joke, possibly)
But, anyways, my deepest condolences. I was terrified to read about your accident and what you have gone through. It makes my past year of suffering from UC seem like nothing. All I wanted to do was get back on my bike with my dog. I'm not a doctor - IT also - but I'm crossing my fingers that you can enjoy biking again, with the grace of doctors, medicine, or any other miracle.
Just as others have said, I admire your spirit and attitude through it all, and I wish you the best as you continue recovering.
My elderly basset hounds were excited to see me again, but soon justified my fantasy Westminster Kennel Club introduction: "an unusually treacherous breed."
Having woofed and leapt about me in an ungainly fashion, they turned to snuffle the shoes of the friend who drove me down from the Denver area, intrigued by the smell of his dog, Mulligan.
After satisfying their noses, they then pursued some crumbs from the pastries that another friend had waiting for us, grew bored, and collapsed on the carpet, exhausted.
They now come to my bedside at 5 a.m., apparently hoping that I'll give in, stand up, and walk them around the block. They'll have to settle for lots of ear rubbing for the next few months while my friend or someone else arrives at 7 a.m. to waddle them around the block. His arrival makes it plain that I won't get to sleep in, since the two little brutes go insane when they see his car pull up, racing around the house and woofing like idiots.
Thanks for your good wishes and best of luck with the colitis--that sounds miserable.
You needn't worry about your grammar or punctuation, since good or bad grammar goes right past everyone most of the time, and punctuation is inaudible, more a pastime for crossword puzzle freaks and English majors than anything of interest to normal people.
The late Ross Thomas amused himself by having the main characters in his thrillers "speak" much "better" in print than his other characters. He sometimes poked a little fun at his slightly stilted language, once having an over-educated foreigner answer the telephone with "It is I, Parvis Mansour," which showed a perfect understanding of the technically correct subjective case for a predicate pronoun following a linking verb, but a complete failure to understand how stilted and unnatural it sounds to the ordinary ear.
I confess that I grew tired of watching my poor therapists painfully scribbling "right upper extremity." They admitted that there was no earthly reason to avoid "right arm" unless treating the goddess Kali, but they could no more abandon their medical tradition than I could stop writing like this.
Much of my therapy consists of ordering basset hounds to move out of doorways and hallways and then laboriously stepping over their brutal indifference.
Their refusal to clear a path may be due to the transfer of their allegiance from me to the fellow who arrives daily at 7 a.m. to exercise them, lest they grow vicious.
Their canine apathy also extended to the loud noises that I made twice a week when the home-visit therapy lady stood at the end of the bed and pulled my arm up over my head.
It turned out that there's no safe word for occupational therapists, who ignore what some would call screams while they feel for what they call a hard stop, where my muscles pitch in and help me beg for mercy.
Having bid farewell to my cheerful occupational dominatrix last week, I now await the first opening for out-patient therapy, scheduled for October 25th.
Meanwhile I hobble around a block or two three times a day and spend a lot of time planning how to avoid getting up from wherever I'm sitting.
When not on parade for two hours, I cross off one damned exercise after another--three 30-minute dynamic splint sessions, ten minutes with an overhead pulley trying to improve my arm and elbow, a ridiculous 45 minutes running through the silly-putty hand and finger exercises, 30 minutes waving embarrassingly tiny weights with each hand, fifteen minutes of one-legged routines, half an hour pedaling against faint resistance while one arm dangles with a weight, and a single trip up and down the basement stairs while pretending that my bad leg is doing the work, not both hands on the railing assisting a heave-up with the good leg.
Then I sit on a shower chair under the hot water and do half an hour of further arm and hand exercises.
Oddly enough, all the hand exercises have given me trigger-finger syndrome.
However, there's measurable progress. Apart from longer walks, I can now lift my bad arm enough to spray under both armpits in the shower, a clearer benchmark than the therapist's 155-degrees-of-motion estimate.
(Not that the basset hounds care about such things, which are beyond their dim comprehension. They kept howling at the living room window at noon when a friend visited, ignoring the fact that he had parked his car, had rung the doorbell, had come inside, and was talking to me in plain sight behind them. I should hire a watch-dog to guard them when I'm out.)
As for my rehab, apart from a therapist pulling on my arm and the damned dynamic splint, the exercises are just tedious and tiring.
And the splint doesn't even hurt my elbow--what hurts is where the jaws of the splint press so hard on my forearm and biceps that my fingers start to go numb in the last ten minutes, just like a leg going to sleep on a sharp-edged chair.
