Kinda Sucks

For the last couple of months I’ve been complaining about my left wrist. I noticed it aching one day and thought nothing of it. I’ve had tendonitis and things like it throughout my life and felt this was nothing more than that. As days passed it got progressively worse until one day when I couldn’t even button my pants because I couldn’t get my fingers to work properly.

Seeing as I don’t have a regular Doctor, I went to the local urgent care where they took some x-rays and told me I had some chips in one of the bones in there and told me to take an anti inflammatory and also gave me some Vicodin for the pain. I took the pain pills for a couple days and decided not to take any more as they didn’t seem to be doing any good. I started wearing a brace on the wrist to keep me from using it and that seemed to help. Instead of having good days and bad, I was having good moments and bad moments. I could be doing something, grabbing onto things and not have any problem. If I did the same thing again it would send a pain through my hand that would literally have me screaming in pain. Kinda sucked.

I ended up going back for more x-rays and they decided to send me for an MRI. The results from that showed problems with the ligaments in the wrist. Actually it’s the lack of said ligaments that seemed to concern them. They decided I needed to see an Orthopedic Surgeon. So that’s what I did.

Turns out I have a “condition” called some long medical name but the acronym for it is SLAC. The AC stands for advance collapse and the SL is the letters to the bone that’s having the problem. It seems that the ligament is too far-gone to repair so the Dr’s. want to do some surgery to fuse the bones in the wrist together. The Dr. said I could probably wait up to about a year to have the surgery.

The problem with having the operation at all is the recovery time. According to the Dr. after the operation there will be a splint on my arm for four weeks. After that they would put a cast on it for another eight weeks. That’s three months of recovery alone without even thinking about the rehabilitation of the muscles after the cast comes off. You have to figure another six to eight weeks of rehab just to get the wrist going again so we’re talking somewhere between five and six months of being without full usage of my arm.

How do people do that? I mean how can you just be out of commission for six months of your life? That’s the part I’m really struggling with. I don’t have disability insurance with my current employer so I obviously can’t take the time right now and I don’t know how long I can go without the surgery. It really does hurt and I’m not one that enjoys a daily dose of pain in my life.

So, there are a few more things thrown on the plate. Sometimes there’s just too many questions that need to be answered for one person to handle. Kinda sucks.