Recovering from Three Fractures

My last few months have been dominated by working to recover from an accident that broke my dominant wrist (both radius & ulna) and collarbone. It has been a humbling, frustrating, and sometimes even an uplifting experience. Since two weeks after my misaligned wrist was corrected in surgery, the rest of my recovery has indeed required work, mainly by me, but also by my excellent physical therapist. In the first therapy session in early October, it was daunting to learn I would need two sessions per week for 8-10 weeks, and daily exercises to do on my own. The nature of my weekly routine was about to dramatically change.

It was difficult adjusting to a one-handed life – typing, eating, and grooming with my left hand. (I am not a very coordinated lefty.) The therapy sessions themselves have been quite ok, if sometimes excruciating, but progress has been very slow. For the first few weeks, it seemed like I was not improving at all; my hand would only close a little, and my wrist would bend and rotate only slightly.

But after six to eight weeks, my wrist and shoulder succumbed to progress. Recovery became more noticeable. I could type with both hands, carry things with my right hand, eat righty, itch the back of my head, and raise my right arm way above my head. But I was still quite far from fully recovered. In fact, in late November I learned that the originally anticipated 10 weeks of therapy would need to be increased to at least four months. I was not surprised, but a little depressed.

As of today, I have just finished that four months of physical therapy and daily exercises, and am mostly recovered, but not quite done. I can make a fist but not tightly, bend back the wrist but not quite all the way, rotate my wrist both ways (but it is still stiffer in the morning than the afternoon). I can rotate my arm up to almost fully vertical, but I’m not close to being able to itch the middle of my back. (This rather awkward arm movement just happens to be the hardest one to exercise for and recover.) I still have several weeks before the physical therapy sessions end and will likely have to continue exercises for several weeks after that. The doctors and therapist now say that I may need 9-12 months from the date of the accident to fully recover. Wow, that was a pricey accident!

I’ve learned a few things along the way that I’ve found both fascinating and difficult:

• It is staggering how quickly a part of the body can get stiff and lose most of its range of motion. A week after the wrist surgery, the doctor asked me to try to make a fist; my fingers barely curled more than a few degrees.
• In between therapy visits, I was told to do daily flexibility exercises up to five times a day. But I found that one set of exercises took me 1.5 hours, so I was not able to muster more than two cycles per day. (Doing five per day would have taken 7.5 hours, the equivalent of a full-time job. I could not do that and continue working.) I suspect doing only two cycles per day slowed my recovery, but to me that was a necessary trade-off.
• After several weeks of scant progress, the doctor said he was not surprised that my recovery was slow. He said that because I broke two bones on the same side of the body, the healing is slower for both as each inflamed area affects the other.
• My collarbone had broken into a few distinct pieces easily discernable in the x-ray. The doctor said he would not take any action. Since the pieces of the collarbone were fairly close to their original location, the bone should heal itself. This was the most fascinating part to me. The pieces did indeed find each other, refastened, and the collarbone essentially reconstituted itself over 6 weeks, sufficiently healed to add shoulder exercises into the physical therapy.

I had never broken a bone before and in this accident broke three. Recovery is an incredibly work-intensive, painstaking, and mentally exhausting process. I have newfound appreciation for the physical therapy process and respect for the therapists. Theirs is hard work and they need to persevere through months of sessions which sometimes seem like they are barely helping at all. But it does help that at least they know that gradually the body will yield and the patient will recover most of his or her previous capability, eventually forgetting the struggle needed to get there. Part of the therapist’s job is to coach the patient through the process and help them to trust that the process will work. That trust made all the difference at times.