One Week Later

I knew as I left the hospital with my arm in a sling that I was going to have trouble with typing. It was one of the least problematic issues I've encountered during the past week. I typed one handed and it took a very long time, but it wasn't like I had anything of great urgency to tackle. Just sitting around being hurt was all I was capable of doing.

If you have an arm that neither bends acutely or straightens out, you are stuck with a pretty useless limb. I can't get a potato chip to my mouth with my left hand even now. It is still painful to get my contacts in place.

Zippers really take two hands to use. My purse slides all over a surface while I try to zip it back up. I can't hook up my underwear properly so … perhaps that is too much information.

It takes two hands to put in a ponytail. It takes two hands to dry your hands. It takes two hands to open up packages, or teeth and one hand when desperate.

It takes two hands to eat a steak or pork roast or chicken breast because they must be cut into bite sized pieces. It is why I've been eating soup and salads and cheese on crackers. I can't cut up the meat, so I've not been eating that. Well, I can eat bacon. Yum, bacon.

While it is possible to pull my pants on, I can't wear anything with a real waistband because I cannot button or snap anything since my clothing is a little on the too tight side to begin with and I only have the one arm and hand. I can get my elastic waist pants up but I look almost as graceful as I was as I skated down the driveway on my inline skates. Yes, it looks that bad as I hop around tugging first one side and then inching up the other. It makes me really think hard about making a trip to bathroom. "Do I really have to go or can I wait. Really, bladder, you can wait a while and we can make one less trip per day," I say to myself by mid-afternoon.

All the little things were astounding. But catastrophically, I couldn't hold the babies for Mother's Day because it would hurt. I had to wear the sling in the car because my arm was aching held in one position for too long.

My arm is bruised in a most curious fashion. I wish I knew exactly how I injured myself. The bruising covers far more area than I thought it would. I keep trying to do something new and it flares up and then I'm taking another pain pill to deaden the ouch factor.

What I miss the most, however, is the ability to take care of myself. I'm alone for a few days, so I'm stuck caring for myself which means that there are certain things that I can't have right now. I wanted tuna in my leftover macaroni salad, but it takes two hands to operate the can opener. I ate plain macaroni salad. It's not like I'm going to perish, but I am going to whine. See?

My arm is getting better each day. It will soon be completely healed and I can get back to my normal life. I hate being dependent and I hate being thwarted. I keep telling myself that I at least have my dominant hand working to full capacity.

I sure hope by a two week post-idiot blog entry I can tell you all that I'm perfectly well and functioning to my normal slug rate. At least I'm typing with two hands again.