So you may have noticed a dearth of arm updates, blogging on the experience, et cetera! I still have a lot to say, but one of the things about recovery is sometimes you hit … a kind of purgatory? limbo? holding state? a miserable stage where you are waiting to find out what’s next. And I spent about 10 months in that state, thinking I was likely to need another surgery to compensate for ways the nerve has NOT regrown, and that surgery was likely to be another couple years of recovery. It felt like I was looking at resetting all the progress I had made, and it really threw me for a loop!
I am now at a stage where it is looking like an additional surgery won’t actually be a helpful thing to do, which is helping clear my head a bit! To be clear: this doesn’t mean my hand is back to “normal” – it firmly is not! – but I’ve regained function that surgery would compromise, even as surgery could give me back other function I have not regained. Maybe someday I’ll explain this better, but it’s just another one of the really hard no-clear-win-condition decisions I’ve had to make along this journey, and right now I am honestly very worn out by it.
I have one more thorough check-in ahead of me before the surgeon hands me off for good, and I don’t want to make any HUGE plans till that’s done, but more and more it’s looking like my life going forward will be one with lots of daily physio exercises (the kind where you wiggle a finger ten times and then feel tired) and partial radial nerve function in my dominant hand. That’s what I have been vaguely expecting since the start of this, but it didn’t really MEAN anything until I got to this stage, if that makes sense?
I’ve talked a lot through the posts on this about how my status has been changing since the start, and how that is a very different experience than adjusting to a new chronic static condition. Now I am likely getting a good look at what nerve connections I will have in this arm for the rest of my life, and starting to get my head around what that is going to mean for learning to function around them (and that WILL be affected by the slow strengthening of what muscles have been successfully re-enervated, as they all atrophied down to nearly nothing in the past two years, but that will be less dramatic than the nerve regrowth process has been.) This is a more familiar state for me as I had a terrible ankle break in 2019 that took two surgeries over two years to get through, and I got to relearn to walk twice, and now six years later I know what that ankle can and can’t do, and I also know how much better I have gotten at using the function it DOES have.
So I am not, like, overjoyed at going forward with partial use of my dominant hand after all this, but it is still: a) better than slowly but steadily losing my radial nerve irreversably, which is what we prevented when we started this whole process; b) better than longterm chronic pain in that hand, which is a real risk of additional surgery; c) not actually apocalyptic, which I think, if you have kept an eye on this blog in the past year, you can see playing out.
These days, with my dominant hand, I can draw, though not the same way I used to. I can write, though it’s slower and more messy than it used to be. I am relearning to type, and I am mad about how slow and clumsy and awkward it feels, but I am doing better than hunting and pecking with my index finger and that’s worth celebrating. There are some things I switched to my left hand after surgery that I am leaving in the care of my left hand for now, maybe forever, and many of them are tasks that require strength AND dexterity, like pouring the kettle, or lifting a hot frying pan, or brushing my teeth. And I am confident that, between physio and just the slow process of daily use, I will get better at using the hand I have. I don’t know how MUCH better; and I do know that I am now more vulnerable to overuse and other types of injuries. But there is a huge relief to be had knowing that right now, things with my hand are not going to be getting worse.
It sure has been a real mindfuck though – and likely will be going forward as well, as I give myself space to safely react to things I was trying to kind of ignore while in limbo. And I do have a lot of thoughts I would still like to write out on the surreal experience of all this, in hopes that anyone else weathering Medical Oddity Life can find some comfort and fellow-feeling amongst the giant pile of words. So I’ll be back with more arm stuff I think, but probably not until after that final checkup in February.
Thanks again for reading along! Take care!
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