Post Surgery

Today I started physical therapy and I got a new splint put on. I thought I'd put a picture up of my incision in case anyone wants to see it. It's about 4 inches long. I should get the stitches out on Wednesday. I realized when doing my exercises that I have very little range of motion. I could only bend my wrist down as far as 15 degrees and I can only touch my thumb to my index and middle fingers. I should get a lot of this movement back from doing the therapy, but the therapist said I probably won't have it 100% back for up to a year.

What's New

My surgery went well. My awesome parents came down to be there during the surgery and take care of me afterwards. Thanks Mom and Mark! It was really nice to have them here. I wasn't in too much pain, but I was taking my pain medication pretty religiously the first 5 days. I'm off it now and back at work this week and feeling pretty good. I go in to see the doctor again tomorrow and hopefully he will take the splint off my arm. It's even uglier than the cast I had on before. Then I believe he'll have me start physical therapy next week. Hopefully I'll be back playing volleyball by the fall. :)

On another note, I paid off my car this month! WOOHOO! I'm so excited about that. 4 years and 9 months ago I purchased a 2003 Ford Focus and it's finally all mine! What a great feeling. Now, of course, I want a new car, haha. But I'm going to put that off for a while. My car is just fine and I should take advantage of not having any car payment for a while.

And the answer is....Surgery

I went back to my orthopedist today, and after his review of my MRI and another x-ray, he decided I should have the surgery. The picture below is one of the images from the MRI. I'm pretty sure you can see where the break is. This is a side view of my wrist and the break is on my radius. That part on top seems to be sliding further down and that's why the doctor wants to do surgery and put a thin metal plate in there. He is afraid it could slide further and really give me problems later on.I have a tentative surgery date for Monday afternoon. The surgery itself should be about an hour. They will put me under anesthesia, but I should be able to go home afterwards. Unfortunately, I will have to take about a week off work to recover. If only this happened in August, I'd be able to use my sick days, but my work has a rule about not being able to access your sick time or vacation until you have been there a year.

The good news is this will speed up my recovery time. Instead of wearing my cast for another 4 weeks, I will only need to wear a splint after the surgery for 1-2 weeks and then begin physical therapy.