Cast off! Not knitting.
Mar. 18th, 2022 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI got the cast sawn off (very nice tool for that, btw) on Wednesday. Arm is SO TINY. Wow, I had no idea how damn fast muscle evaporates when not being used. Like, it's creepy skeleton arm over there, worse than general muscle loss after menopause. Mobility is... eh.
I got a split (it was crappy, I have a better one that I'm using instead) and the advice Make Good Choices. Not kidding.
I have stolen for you an illustrated diagram of how the wrist is supposed to move, to facilitate your understanding of my whining. Here ya go.
Flexion and extension are a fucking joke. Seriously a joke. I can get about 30 degrees of extension (with wrist on table) and that's with me trying REALLY HARD. My other wrist does about 85 degrees of extension (unassisted) and a pain-free full 90 if I put any weight on it. Flexion is similarly shitty. Not only does it not work, it fucking hurts to do any assisted improvement of RoM.
I have about a third of radial and ulnar deviation functioning. Also fucking painful. Like ouch.
Pronate and supinate are about 75% of what they should be, with a slight edge on the pronate performance. This also hurts at the edges of performance.
Fingers are in pretty good shape. Typing is almost 100% of what it was pre-fall. There is a small amount of thumb stiffness in the "touch thumb to pinky" task which I could not do in the cast. I'm working on it.
The ortho says the bones are healing well which I guess is good. What the ortho neglected to mention (but other reading has supplied) is that falling on your outstretched hand hard enough to break shit is going to fuck up your tendons and ligaments to where they are gonna NOT BE HAPPY for a while. Pictures of ligament shit on your wrist shows a thick band of stuff around the wrist like a bracelet. That area on my wrist is still visibly puffy and... cranky. There's a fun audible click-pop when picking my hand up for wrist extension. That wasn't there before.
Anyway, I have exercises to do and I am doing them. We'll see how things go moving forward. Things are getting better day by day. I can lift and drink from a large Dunkin coffee using broken hand. I can hold a truck steering wheel while driving. (Both of those are new this week.) I can scoop a #10 can of horse feed with the broken hand. I can hold a paintbrush. I can use chopsticks with broken hand. There's progress. It's not all failure. Just... I'm not very patient.
I got a split (it was crappy, I have a better one that I'm using instead) and the advice Make Good Choices. Not kidding.
I have stolen for you an illustrated diagram of how the wrist is supposed to move, to facilitate your understanding of my whining. Here ya go.
Flexion and extension are a fucking joke. Seriously a joke. I can get about 30 degrees of extension (with wrist on table) and that's with me trying REALLY HARD. My other wrist does about 85 degrees of extension (unassisted) and a pain-free full 90 if I put any weight on it. Flexion is similarly shitty. Not only does it not work, it fucking hurts to do any assisted improvement of RoM.
I have about a third of radial and ulnar deviation functioning. Also fucking painful. Like ouch.
Pronate and supinate are about 75% of what they should be, with a slight edge on the pronate performance. This also hurts at the edges of performance.
Fingers are in pretty good shape. Typing is almost 100% of what it was pre-fall. There is a small amount of thumb stiffness in the "touch thumb to pinky" task which I could not do in the cast. I'm working on it.
The ortho says the bones are healing well which I guess is good. What the ortho neglected to mention (but other reading has supplied) is that falling on your outstretched hand hard enough to break shit is going to fuck up your tendons and ligaments to where they are gonna NOT BE HAPPY for a while. Pictures of ligament shit on your wrist shows a thick band of stuff around the wrist like a bracelet. That area on my wrist is still visibly puffy and... cranky. There's a fun audible click-pop when picking my hand up for wrist extension. That wasn't there before.
Anyway, I have exercises to do and I am doing them. We'll see how things go moving forward. Things are getting better day by day. I can lift and drink from a large Dunkin coffee using broken hand. I can hold a truck steering wheel while driving. (Both of those are new this week.) I can scoop a #10 can of horse feed with the broken hand. I can hold a paintbrush. I can use chopsticks with broken hand. There's progress. It's not all failure. Just... I'm not very patient.
