So here is the story: I was walking at the gym last Tuesday, tripped, and fell heavily onto my right forearm. Which felt really painful, and then after the initial really painful part, really weird (and wouldn’t bend or rotate). So my walking buddy took me to the ER and after a couple of hours, an X-ray, and some good pain drugs, I was diagnosed with a fractured radial head. To be more specific, the end of the radius (one of the two bones in my forearm) has a chip out of it, which is now floating around in my elbow. The orthopedic surgeon was a bit puzzled as to how I managed to do that – it’s apparently not the sort of way radial heads normally get fractured.
Since there are lots of important nerves and blood vessels that go through the elbow, this is not an ideal situation. Also, I still can’t fully straighten my arm (though as you can all see, I have my typing back. Temporarily…more on that in a minute), I have next to no muscle strength in that arm, and no rotation. I also have no endurance to speak of – just holding my arm in place to type these two paragraphs has tired it out noticeably.
So I go in for elbow surgery tomorrow, to remove the bone chip. I anticipate that it will be at least a week after that before I can really do much at all, let alone do much with my right hand. (Yes, that’s my dominant hand.) When I do start getting it back…well, I currently have five sets of page proofs to review before the end of the month and progress to be made on The New Thing. So it will be at least a couple of weeks, I think, before I can get back to blogging. Which is really frustrating, but that’s life.
Thank you all for your good wishes, and I hope you’ll all check back in a few weeks. If nothing else, I’ll try to post another update on how things are going.