One Week Later…

Well, that hurt.

It says something about just how much pain I have been in for the last seven years or so, how high my baseline of “normal” became, that my yet-to-be-fixed left hand hurts more than the repaired right hand that got cut open palm to wrist and has been healing with zero pain management other than “lol Tylenol I guess.”

Sometimes you just forget that you lived without pain at some point. Pain becomes the new neutral resting state.

The recovery has taken longer than I’d like, so I’m sorry for my silence. I am such a rapid metabolizer of almost any medication that they had to up the anesthetic three times during a 15 minute surgery…which was supposed to be a ten minute surgery, but my carpal tunnel (“caramel tunnel” according to Bastian) is so severe the doctor came within a breath of just saying HOLY SHIT when she opened me up. Took longer than usual to handle it because it was just that bad.

So my incision was bigger, I was open longer, and they had to dig deeper than usual, and instead of being able to type right away as they assured me I would be able to, everything BUT the incision site was numb as shit for like four days before I could even think about resting the heel of my hand on a keyboard or Bear the tension of arcing my fingers enough to work…well, obviously I ended up succumbing to the necessity of taking care of myself GROSS.

It is better and looking pretty okay under that bandage today. I’m slowly trying to do things again, though it seems every possible activity pulls on the stitches and screams.

WHINING AND COMPLAINING!

Stitches out maybe end of this week, maybe next, depending on the follow up appointment, and I’m really trying to get back in the saddle this week. I can type on my phone! (As this post and the rewards going up today were done.) Laptop cannot be far!

But you know what? Only the incision site hurts on my right hand. My fingers aren’t numb or aching. My tendons don’t somehow itch. It doesn’t seize up into a claw if I have the audacity to hold a knife.

That’s…pretty crazy for me. This all started in 2013 and got REALLY bad once I had a baby. I forgot what having hands instead of painstumps was actually like.

Thank you all for your patience while I whinge and complain and one-hand my way through getting my kid off to the first day of school (where the fuck did this summer go?) and deal with a refrigerator that broke and spoiled all out food three days after surgery and attempt but fail to do The Things for Space Oddity coming out in less than a month while I slowly go mad because I’m not technically allowed to do anything with my paw for like two more days.

But. I’m on the other side of it.

Posts coming! Right hand becoming slowly less red! Fall is coming! New novel out soon! I might actually get to be a primate again!