Soooooooooooooo…..
Here I am… Thinking that since I have to get up way way early to get my butt to work in the morning, I should try to sleep. Sleep isn’t likely. I’m totally stressing… and I’m not sure if it is worse to not know but to struggle, or to know.
I like the hand and wrist guy. He is honest and no BS. Unfortunately…
And he showed my my x-rays. Not a good thing.
My story… such as it is…
I broke my arm in 1997 rollerblading. Radius was broken compound and ulna was greenstick. The orthopedist set my arm, rebroke it and reset it. No PT… just “fixed”… and it didn’t heal well.
Skip forward ten years… The didn’t heal well was totally getting to me and I wanted it fixed. I found a STERLING quack who told me he was going to fix both bones (lengthen the radius, scape the spurs off the ulna)… welll… maybe not, actually only lengthened the radius, decided the ulna could wait to another surgery (money money money money money). But I did do PT. And I did well for a while…
Skip forward 2 years… hello RA… hmmmmm I wonder more and more if this mess wasn’t my trigger to turn on the pissed off body… X-Rays then were a wonderful thing… I’m so glad Dr Booth made me have them.
Skip forward 2 years. Here I am. RA doing some better. Not so much squish, unfortunately in some ways. Now my inability to turn my wrist over… or down… to any great degree… the ache in my wrist… everything… and here I am.
I “got” to see the X-Rays he took today. It was not a good thing. I got to see that the break that was done to the radius to lengthen it never did heal… the dead guy (cadaver bone) that I keep thinking of as being in my arm never actually did the job. The only thing holding the two pieces of the radius together is the metal plate. The two pieces aren’t held to length any more and they are offset by about half… the screws that used to hold the plate in place to the bone (there were three of them) are now in pieces and parts. ONE is whole, the others are in two pieces… and the end of the plate is being encased in calcification. The reason I can’t use my wrist right is because the radius is now significantly shorter than the ulna.
And I got to SEE all of this up close and personally.
Apparently the healing LOOKED like it was happening but because no one saw fit to follow up after the cast came off, no one realized that it didn’t. Not sure if it was infection or my RA early on or what, but nothing healed… all that has been doing any work is the plate.
So where am I now?
I “get” to have a nerve conduction test next week.
When the doctor gets back (and after I have taken the first two weeks off from my enbrel) I will have surgery. Scar will be removed from the underside of the wrist… the old plate will be removed and all of the pieces of plate that aren’t embedded in bone will be picked out. new plate will be put in place and bolted fast. We are going to scrape the bone ends on both ends and we will drill holes in the ends to trick the bones into thinking that they were broken and will heal themselves. Next incision… outside of the wrist to take the end of the ulna out and see if I can stand to live without an end. Otherwise it will be a joint replacement in the ulnar joint…
OH… and if the nerve is weirded out, elbow incision to move the nerve out of whatever position it is currently in into a new one.
Two weeks no-enbrel post surgery… four weeks total. I really really hope it doesn’t piss my RA off too much… I don’t want to have to fall back to nothing…
Every time I close my eyes, I see the X-Rays. I see the gap in the bones in my wrist. I see the offset. I see the broken screws… I don’t know if I’m feeling worse because I know what it looks like, or because it does hurt…
And I’m scared.
A Figment Of Fitness 