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Wolverine or Frankenstein? On one hand, I don't recall anything from the operating table; I just know that I was implanted with lots of metal, and have the x-rays to prove it. On the other hand, I have some horrific stitching, and my foul left arm looks like it was found floating in a river. |
| I'm not as hairy as Hugh Jackman, but I can do angry. I've already twice been goaded into a fight and responded by threatening to give the assailant a beatdown with my cast. Dramatic posturing aside, the erector set in my arm would not make a very good weapon. And the meds are taming the rage and making me more suited to a softshoe Puttin' on the Ritz. | |
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Thanks to my ever-present camera phone, I have carefully documented damage pictures from my incident involving the erratic tow truck driver. My bone didn't pop out or anything, but I did need surgery. My arm’s state of the art design that allows me a flexible range of twisting action, needed some fixing. The radius bone (one of two in the forearm) supports the strength of the lower arm, so when it snaps, the two halves twist in opposite directions. You can't just hold them together until they heal; they need to be repositioned and attached together with some hardware. To get in there, they filet the arm and dig underneath a major nerve that's critically important to movement and sensitivity in the hand. Fortunately for me, I live in the 21st Century, in a first world country and have health insurance. I'd pretty much be hosed if this happened a century or two ago. Of course, back then they didn't have motorcycles or tow trucks either. Five days after waking up from surgery, I went back to my orthopedic surgeon at Kaiser's French Campus on Geary and 6th Avenue to get checked out. The story I'd got so far suggested I'd have a tiny incision that allowed some micromachines to crawl in and repair my bone with some teeny screws. As it turned out, the unwrapping was not only far more interesting than Geraldo's 1986 pseudo-journalistic, non-event broadcast of The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault, but it took much less time to sit through as well. The first shocker was the picture in the live video x-ray. The teeny screws I had imagined turned out to be big fat bolts. They looked bigger than an oil pan drain plug, but the picture was enlarged a bit. Since the refresh rate on the monitor left wavy lines through my photograph, I also snapped a shot of the printed x-ray. Next the splint came off: the mummy bandage, the partial plaster cast that wrapped around about a third of my arm, and finally the gauze padding. Inside was something that looked like a rotten football with too many stitches. My arm was still pretty swollen. My hand and wrist were fine, so I got fitted with a shorter splint that stopped at my wrist rather than covering half my hand. That was a nice change! Now I could start compulsive hand washing again on both sides equally. Beyond being able to wash it, my hand and arm still wasn't able to do anything useful. It just hung around pitifully at my side while I watched it atrophy and wrinkle. I'd look at it and try to give it useful things it could do, watch it fail, and then sit it back in place as comfortably as possible and feed it more pain meds. It was like having grandparents move in. My traumatized arm is bruised from my elbow to my armpit. It's all fat and swollen and a colored a foul mix of pale jaundice yellow and rotten sewage green. Bleah! As bad as it looked the first week, it got far more foul over this last week of inactivity. Well, inactivity for my left arm; the rest of me is cranking away trying to stay busy working so I can afford the luxuries of regular meals and indoor living. San Francisco is an expensive town. I was originally scheduled to come back in two weeks. My doctor was going on vacation though, so I got bumped up. After driving my rental pickup an hour up north to work at a client in Novato at 9 AM, I raced back to the French Campus to come in for my 2 PM appointment. I only had about an hour for the check up and lunch, because my next job was at 3:30. Fortunately the doctor visit went fast. The bandages came off. Rather than looking like a fat football, now it's all skinny and wrinkled from the snug bandages. The texture of the gauze pads was imprinted into my arm. The deeper indentations looked almost fully translucent, like skinny windows into my scrawny, naked arm meat. |
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| The nastiest shot is a close up of my railroad of staples. It felt like progress to have them taken out. Using a little scissor crimp tool, he kinked the staples and they pretty much fell out painlessly, except for when they pulled a hair or two. The removal was even less painful than my last staple experience, where I had seven holding together the back of my head. I had fallen running up the stairs at a party and split my scalp open on a sharp corner. Those hurt a bit more, but mostly just because they were pulling more hair. |
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Whoever invented those smart staples should get a Nobel Peace Prize. That is, if they have any left after nominating Gee Dub. I suppose Osama bin Laden is in line too, for his contribution to exposing the flaws in existing airline security. In any case, I think Dr. Staples should at least get a plaque or something. |
| I got freshly re-splinted and wrapped up. That gave me scant time to eat, so I grabbed a Combination F at the KFC/Taco Bell on the corner and headed to my next job. I stayed busy repairing a failed server install until 1:30 AM. That left me looking for parking in the Haight Ashbury at 2 AM, which is never a good thing. Bleah, what a long day. |
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I had to get up early the next day to move my truck for street cleaning. After that I wasn't really sleepy so I went in to work. Today was another long workday. It's going to be nice to have a long weekend. I'll have to try and relax. |
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