Pandemic Diaries - Year 3 - The Saga of the Hands

6 March, 2023

 

Well, February has come and gone and I have not posted a blog.  I've been busy with other things.  Nothing exciting, nor fun.  But one of those necessary things that needs to be dealt with to continue living and being able to do everything I would like to do.

 

Over the summer, I realized my hands were beginning to look like turtles.  Yes, a bit dry, but what I really mean is that my thumbs were beginning to look like they were retracting into my hands.  Rather the way a turtle pulls its head into its shell.  I wasn't sure what turtle hands indicated, so I talked to my primary care provider.  She sent me to a hand specialist orthopedic doctor, who took x-rays and showed me that I basically had worn out my thumb joints.  Actually not so much the thumb itself, but the joint below the thumb where the bone meets the wrist.  The little bone probably has its own name, one of those something-carpal-somethings, I don't know.

 

All I knew was that my thumbs were beginning to retract into the hands, it was becoming more difficult to do fine motor skills such as drawing, and my thumbs ached if I use them excessively.  At any rate, the hand specialist said I was ready for surgery.  They explained what needed to be done, and what the surgery would entail.  The recuperation period would include being in a splint or brace for a total of six to eight weeks, as well as physical therapy.  (If you want the surgical details, they can be found online.  I'll skip the details here.)

 

The first photo shows my left hand with the magically retracting turtle thumb.  As soon as we arrived in Florida, Richard and I went to a medical practice we had visited two years ago.  One of my requests was a referral to the regional hand specialist.  I had to wait for an appointment to see a doctor who would be able to write the referral to the orthopedic hand specialist.  It took a while to see the hand person, but once I was there and said that I was looking for a permanent solution, they were very quick to schedule appointments to see the surgeon himself and set a date for the surgery.

 

This gave me plenty of time to prepare for not having the use of my right hand for a six to eight week.  I cooked and froze food and meals, I cleaned and washed, and tried to make sure I would be able to be independent while only having the use of my left hand.

 

And yes Siri is typing this blog post for me, although she does tend to make quite a few errors and I will need to go back and manually (left handedly) correct Siri's mistakes.

 

I had the actual surgery on February 16.  The second photo shows my hand all wrapped up in bandages, then a splint or brace so that I could not move my thumb, and the whole thing wrapped in an ACE bandage.  It was uncomfortable, but the anesthesiologist had administered a nerve block so that my arm from the elbow to my fingers was totally numb.  I did not realize that numb also meant I could not make that body part move.  The post surgery nurse recommended I sleep in the recliner that first night.  Our couch has recliner seats at each end, so Richard and I spent my first post surgical night sleeping on our couch.  I propped my arm up on a group of pillows by my side, but at one point I woke up because my arm had actually fallen into my face!!  Yes, not the way one wants to wake up.

 

The nerve block turned out to be wonderful however.  It kept me from feeling any pain whatsoever for the first twenty-four hours after surgery.  I do have pain medication, which I took on the recommended regular basis for the first several days.  After that I tapered off to medication as needed because it made me fall asleep within an hour or two.

 

After the first week, I was sent to physical therapy.  There is not much that can be done for the first four to six weeks because soft tissue needs time to heal.  My therapist explained we would start with very limited motion exercises, and she made sure that I was raising and lowering my fingers, curling them into a partial fist, and extending them straight up.  She also took off the post surgical bandaging, and created a fancy-dancy brace for my arm which mobilizes my thumb but allows me the use of my other fingers.  The basic brace comes in black, but each patient has a choice of colors for the Velcro straps which keep the brace closed.  I of course chose hot pink because it coordinates with most of my summer wardrobe!  Just because I am recuperating does not mean I cannot be a fashionista.

 

I think I'm starting my third week of wearing the black brace and will have my third physical therapy appointment on Wednesday.  We are still working on finger motion but have added taking the brace off twice per day, gently washing the two small incision sites, and then gently rubbing the area with a soft cloth.  It turns out having a fabric sleeve and brace on the arm for roughly twenty hours a day sensitizes the skin. This means the least little irritation becomes excruciatingly painful.  So rubbing with the soft cloth helps to desensitize the skin.

 

To help prevent the buildup of scar tissue, I then gently massage the entire area with cocoa butter skin lotion.  Fortunately this is what I use for my rather dry skin anyway.  We will continue with physical therapy for three or four more weeks.  After having been in the black brace for four weeks, it will be cut down to only include the thumb and around the hand, possibly ending around my wrist.  I'll wear that modified brace for two more weeks, but the soft tissue will have healed by that point. Then we begin to rebuild my strength and dexterity.

 

My therapy has been held with other patients, usually two or three of us sitting around a table as our therapist demonstrates what each of us need to do at that session.  So I know when I'm ready, I will be working with small pegs that go into Styrofoam, something with string, and pulling small pegs out of a huge lump of Play-Doh.  Such exciting tasks, right?

 

Anyway, by the time we are ready to leave Florida toward late April I should be ready to drive, although I will not be able to lift heavy luggage on my own.  Richard and I will pack our stuff and get everything back into the car, although he will need to help me pick up anything that weighs more than five pounds.

 

We have a family event in late April in the northeast, and then we will likely spend some time in one of our favorite cities, New York.  That will give us two or three weeks to drive across the country, before we arrive back in Washington state again for the summer.

 

We are working on finding another small house to rent, and I am also trying to make arrangements for surgery to repair my left hand thumb.  I will have all summer to recuperate and rebuild the strength in that thumb.  Then, hopefully, I can get back and finish some of my crochet projects which were left unfinished due to my arthritic thumbs.  I guess this is one of those art teacher problems that no one warns us about when we spend eight hours a day cutting tile and cementing it on a wall for a huge mural.  Or two murals.  Oh well, they were fun.  

 

And it took ten years before I began to feel any problems from overworking my hands.  So with these two surgeries, I'm hoping the arthritis stays away and I get another fifty or sixty years of use out of my hands.  That probably should be enough.