yes, yes, I’m getting to it.
Fact is, there are no promises here. My right, dominant hand will never be the same. We triaged a degenerative condition, we aren’t healing an acute injury. This is so, so much harder on my brain, just as a framework for recovery at all.
Right after surgery, I spent two weeks with my lower arm in a cast.
The incision was above the elbow, but for the nerves to heal, we had to hold my wrist still. You can really yank on your radial nerve by bending your wrist — don’t try it, it feels bad.
So I had a huge bandage on my bicept and a cast on my forearm.
I remember waking up from surgery and mentally reaching out to see what state my hand was in. I could feel my fingers moving a little and briefly hoped they’d gotten the growth out without severing the nerve!
But they didn’t. That wasn’t a possibility and I knew it.
But the thing is, my wrist and fingers still had all of the flexion muscles working fine – I could curl my fingers and thumb into a weird fist, and I could bend my wrist down with full force ( tho I didn’t try till the cast came off) – because those nerves were unaffected. I just couldn’t uncurl anything. And for about six months that was the state of things.
After getting the cast off, I got fitted for a thermoplastic brace. The brace holds my wrist in mild extension, because you need your wrist angled up a bit to give you the most power in your grip. I also got a fabric brace with custom-bent metal stays to do the same thing, but the thermoplastic one is stronger and better able to stabilize against my flexion muscles. For six months I lived, breathed, ate, drank, slept, showered, spent 100% of the time in a brace. If I wanted my fingers to uncurl, I used my other hand or the environment to do it. if I wanted to hold my partner’s hand, it was a three-hand process. And for most of that time I didn’t use my partially paralyzed dominant hand to do anything more glamorous than stabilize whatever my left hand was trying to do.
I can’t really talk about this elegantly. It fucking sucked. Everything – and I mean everything – was suddenly harder. Switching dominant hands is a years long thing and the science I read on the subject says no one ever does it fully, not even after decades of living with an amputated dominant hand. There was no chance of settling in in that first six months and getting suddenly good at brushing my teeth with my left hand. Like, despite doing that multiple times a day for the past year I’m definitely still not good at it!
Everything was suddenly disorienting. What hand opens the door? What hand turns the key in t he lock? Wait, which way locks the door again? I got confused about what way to rotate lids to get them on and off because I was doing it all backwards.
And then there’s all those comforting hobbies I listed above. They all became instantly fraught. Drawing. Writing. Typing. Sculpting. Crafts. Collage. Gardening. Baking. Any and all therapeutic cleaning. Using a broom is hard! And all of the floor stretches and home yoga and such that I had been doing for self maintenance before this surgery suddenly was overwhelmingly complicated, because my right arm was a flimsy husk of its former self AND was in a fixed wrist position due to the brace. How, pray tell, does one downward a dog in this condition.
Pouring the kettle was complicated.
Cutting up my own food was complicated.
Using my phone was complicated.
Getting dressed was complicated.
All my shoes now are slip-ons; shirts and coats that don’t fit over inches thick braces and their attendant padding just haven’t been worn. I stopped driving – I couldn’t put my right hand on thes steering wheel without the help of my left. My partner still has to open many bottles for me. It’s been a big shift.
I felt like I had to give up a LOT of independance, way more than I expected, and suddenly I had no idea what hobbies were or if any human had ever enjoyed one in the history of the world. Anything that required my participation was extremely, infuriatingly, disorientingly new.
Leave a Reply