Monday, August 11, 2008

My Racing Stripes



I was given permission take off my bandages and expose my hand to the world. I am never excited to check out my own war wounds because it's kind of gross but I had to do it sometime I guess. Those stripes are where they inserted the metal plates and screws. It is shiny because I am queen of the Vitamin E right now.

So all looks good as you can see except that I have the hand of Frankenstein now. There goes my hand modeling career down the tubes........ unless it's for Halloween that is! There is still a lot of swelling and some more numb areas that I discovered too which sucks. But the numb areas are really confined to the top of my hand thank heavens so I am not going to complain.

I have no pain at all at this point but the hand IS the pain in the sense that I wake up every morning to the stiffest 2 by 4 in the world. I feel like a 1000 year old lady with arthritis in the mornings. Once I get it moving it gets looser though, thank heavens! Sweet - the age of 95 at 35.

I still cannot make a fist which is concerning. I realize that I am only 3 weeks out of surgery but I haven't seen major improvement yet with that particular home exercise I do everyday. I am about 45 degrees off from making a fist which is actually a pretty big number. I am trying not to think about that at this point though because I am not sure what it means yet (is it good, bad or just plain ugly?).

I am being a good patient and am doing everything the doctor is telling me to do. The in home hand therapy is going well too and I have made huge improvements in 3 of the 5 home exercises I need to do every day.

Still working on increasing the size of my ever shrinking left shoulder. I think we have gone from walnut size to maybe golf ball size now with the exercises I have been doing for it. On that note, this is something I took upon myself. My doctor never mentioned doing this (he knows I am doing it though) and there is something to learn from that: Always ask tons questions (I take a pretty big list in each time I see him - they just LOVE me for that too!! Ha ha!!) and take your own health into your own hands. Be proactive because they can't think of all the scenarios for you!

I will admit though that the one thing I am doing in addition to my hand therapy is practicing my braking on both the road and mountain bike while I ride the trainer. At first when I got on my bike to practice this I could only move the brake in about a 1 mm in. Now I can do sets of 15, pulling the brakes all the way back! Yee haw! I am doing this in hopes that I will keep the strength I have so when I can get back on the bike I am good to go.

I am able to use my hand and fingers some at this point too but the lack of flexibility interferes sometimes along with my broken wrist of course too. I am not supposed to lift more than 5 lbs with my hand though. But it does seem to be getting back in to the action some because it's taking over some chores now. Hopefully I will become a bit ambidextrous too. It has been about 3 months in a cast this season for that (left) hand and quite frankly I forgot (and so did it) what it normally did so I am making it do everything. Why not? Meanwhile though my right hand and arm think its all that and a bag of chips. Man. It jumps in there trying to over power the world and I need to swat it away and MAKE lefty do it. Kind of annoying.

I am also training everyday since 5 days after surgery on the trainer. I am very happy that I am able to do this but getting outside on those hikes has become imperative!

Other than that, I am still in a removable brace and things are pretty darn tooting good now that I discovered the wonderful world of hiking! If you made it this far in the this post......thanks for caring enough to read to the end.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you'll be back on the road soon....I feel it in my unbroken bones!

KATHY SHERWIN said...

Remind me again what is it like to have unbroken bones. Been since April for me...