I smooshed my hand

You’ll have to excuse me for not writing much lately. Earlier this month I had an accident that resulted in me damaging my left hand – badly. Oh and unfortunately my left hand is my writing hand so that makes typing on the computer or doing pretty much anything a whole lot more difficult!

We’ve been doing some renovations on our home and my husband “stupidly” left an extension ladder – you know one of those huge metal ladders – out in our living room. It was lying on it’s side up against a table that we have our turtle tank on but that table happens to be right in the hallway that leads from the dining room to the kitchen. Well … Early in the morning of June 7th I was wandering into the kitchen to get a drink of water and as I came back through that hallway in the semi-dark my foot caught on the ladder – or something – I really don’t know what happened and the next thing I knew I was falling literally on top of the ladder and almost under the side table.

Skip forward to a very swollen left hand, a huge bruise on my lower left thigh a trip to the local emergency room that took 6 hours – with xrays of my hand and a follow up visit with a plastic surgeon that specializes in hands and I’m in a special hand splint because it looks like I have a torn ligament in my left thumb, and possibly a torn ligament in my outer left wrist or maybe a break in the bones there. Next week I have a follow up visit with the surgeon to see how my hand is doing. It’s still swollen and bruised but less than it was to begin with so that’s good. Then if it’s not healing well enough or if she thinks it might be a complete tear of a ligament I guess she’s going to send me for an MRI and then depending on the results I might have to have surgery.

So … thanks for leaving the ladder out Chris! Whatever happens it looks like I’m going to be in this splint for at least another four weeks so there goes half the summer. Do you know how hard it is to type on fingered and how hard it is to do just about everything else with your non-dominant hand? I take a lot of medicines and I can’t even open my pill bottles properly! I have to leave most of them open with the caps sitting on top and I’m really messed up if I close one! Oh and I can’t even use the plastic twist thing on a loaf of bread to open or close the bag. It’s hard to do with your non dominant hand and since my left hand is all splinted up so that I can’t use my thumb it’s almost impossible and very painful to do with my left hand. So my bread is put in a Ziploc bag for now.

 

The huge lump in my thigh is slowly going down. It’s been 11 days since the accident. What was once one huge lump is now several smaller ones. I don’t know if that’s good or bad? Smaller is good I suppose but it was HUGE to begin with. I was told not to be too active.

I know I’ll figure more things out as time goes by, but I’m not a happy camper.