nothing prepares you for an accident ...worse still one where you break all three bones in one hand .... the pain post wiring helps one redefine the very concept of pain ..... the rod in the humerus was the most painfull ....the nuts and bolts inserted to keep the rod in place ....one can feel ...one also feels a marginal increase in the weight of one's hand ...... the hand and fingers swell up many a times .... and pain becomes a constant ....
the most amusing part of dealing with pain was my experience with dynapar .... the minute i read about it being a banned drug ....my pain threshold went up in an hour ..... and i realised that day the power of the brain to control pain ... it is all within our will power to control and chanelise our energies .... one important decision was to be as self reliant as possible ...so hair was chopped as short as possible ....the doctor advised me to switch to western clothes ...specially a button down top to make things easy for early mornings ....zzzzzzzzz was akward and the hand had to kept at a particular angle to be able to rest properly ....the most difficult thing to adapt to was ...not being able to pick up my little one who was not yet three ....he too would get angry at times and wiggle his way around my fibre glass cast ... somedays if he caught me reading for class ...he would come and ask me ...is this your right hand ....and when i answered in the affirmative .... he would hit my cast with what ever he was carrying .... often he would ask me, if he could sit on my cast when i was walking ....and i had to always refuse
working was a challenge .... it was peak winter and getting up very early at around 5 am or so was difficult .... in the pvt college i was teaching ...somedays the podium would be missing from the class room and that meant some extra strain on my left hand ...
my main intention was to get back to normal asap ..... food i started experimenting with ....trial and error helped me find that watermelon juice was extremely beneficial in bringing down the swelling in my fingers ... coconut water helped a lot and pineapple is another fruit i had very often ... plus green leafy vegetables and lots of cheese ..... i can never get myself to drink milk .... some days the exhaustion of going to two colleges ...wearing a sling and just managing to draw diagrams with my left hand .....was akin to climbing mount everest .... since the ulna and radius were crushed to small fragments just above the wrist ...it hurt a little extra ... i always wondered why the doctor did not plate the radius and ulna ...if he had done that the shards could have been physically removed .... when i once asked him, as to why he did not do that ...he said he wanted to avoid giving me big scars ...sigh ....
the thing about the plate is that, the point where the skin is cut is a significant area and flesh from that part disappears and it is will remain a sensitive part .... and a part that every person with a scar will be carefull about ... even a small contact with any external element there .....gives a raw feeling, plus pain too .....
when bone becomes fragmented ... and then grows back ...it tends to become longer .....a very important fact used by ortho surgeons in increasing the height of people with growth challenges ....
5 months with the cast being on i started getting really bored of it and the not being able to eat what i wanted ... so on 14th feb 2008 i made my first meal ....with my left hand and even washed vessels with my hand .... i could not make a lot of food but some basic cooking i would get done .... the first time my cast was changed ..... it was a revelation as ....i saw how wasted my hand had become ..... it shivered when the cast was removed and they were cleaning it ....and yes there was a bend to it now ...one of the bones had become longer and my palm was twisted to the right ...... that was an irritating factor .... and hampered a lot of movements and work i could do .....holding a knife and chopping vegetables was one and writing another ....i still could not hold my little one who had grown up a bit more by now .....the most difficult aspect of life with the cast on was the help i needed to have a bath ... the hair being short was a big help ...i could wash it in the wash basin too ....the 5 days every month used to psyche me ...specially when i was in college .....
the good part about us humans is how fast we adapt to changes ..... the first day post operation i could not brush my teeth with my left hand ...i kept getting hurt ....soon i was using my left hand as well as my right ..... as children both my brother and i had a preference for our left hand which my mom had changed to a right hand dominance ... i became quite ambidextrous by the time the cast was removed ...it was a very long wait and the day it was removed, i remember feeling very anxious and almost as though i had lost a security cover .....
in 2008 the rods in my ulna and radius were removed and a plate inserted after a bit of my bone was cut to take off the curvature .... in 2009 i had a longer operation where my plate and the rod and screws in my humerus were removed ....when i woke up post operation i remember seeing huge welts on my upper arm ....and i realised how much force, they must have had to use to dislodge the rod in my arm ....
the only correction left is a curvature in my ulna ...which strangely hurts when i lose weight ...combing my tresses, and washing my face are still done with my left hand ....cooking is not easy with my right hand but i kind of make do ....i do not employ domestic help post leaving the tea estates ...the work at home keeps my hand functioning ..extreme cold hurts me and requires that i am fully covered with a bit of extra warm clothes ... i developed a very bad habit of using my left hand and favouring my right hand ....this would give me a pain in a spot between my shoulder blades .... this changed drastically when i met with my second accident in 2010 and hurt my left hand real bad .... i guess adversities come to us to show us how resilient we are .... and how well we bounce back ... i started using my right hand post this accident....
if only, i could over come my fear of roads, and traffic ...
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