How I Spent the Next 4 Weekends

Healing.

It sounds like such an easy thing to do. You sit back and relax, you heal. You let the body fix itself because after all, the body knows what it needs to do and it would like you to get out of its way so it can do it. What the heck, maybe if you relax a little bit more you’re body, now free of any pesky outside distractions such as who’s going to mow the lawn or who’s going to pick up my socks, can heal faster. It’s a working theory I have and one I took full adva…… put into action to determine the final truth of it.

After all, if you’re spending energy working around the house, you’re NOT spending energy healing your body, right? The doctor also said that I “…was not to use this hand AT ALL because this could adversely affect the healing process.” THIS, was my point.

I needed to heal. I needed to direct all of my body’s energy at healing my broken bone. Needlessly directing my energy elsewhere would actually delay or even ruin my ability to fully help around the house later. My Girl’s point, for the dissenting side, was that someone else (i.e. me) REALLY needed to pick up my dirty socks, books, and god forbid she find last week’s dinner plate before I do…OK, fine. Maybe she’s on to something with that last one. But still. I’m healing, be nice to me.

One of the things that the doctors and nurses don’t tell you about when you’ve got a broken hand is that there are going to be some rather invasive…adjustments, that you’ll have to make. I suspect instead of telling you, they place bets on when you’re going to ask them about…things. Then they giggle evilly as they bring out charts, graphs and wonderfully descriptive analyses about exactly how many adjustments you’re going to need to make.
I hadn’t put much thought into how a broken hand was going to affect my life other than “Crap, I won’t be able to do ANY golfing for most of the summer.” Sometimes, I have a bad habit of not looking just a bit further or more precisely, more in-depth into the immediate future. I don’t know why, I just don’t. My neighbors on the other hand, hit upon the ultimate indignity within seconds of seeing my broken right hand. Surprisingly enough, they had struck upon the very sentiment I had just expressed.

“You’re right handed aren’t you?” They asked innocently.
“Yep, it’s gonna rot! No golf at all for six weeks, and it’s summer.” They smiled and agreed that yes it would rot because, against all probability it was indeed now summer. Then, completely without any warning at all, they sprang this on me.

“How’re you gonna wipe?”

Blink.

Aaaaaaaaaaa, shit. Visions of switching hands fleet momentarily through my mind. This is really going to suck donkey wangers.

This is not something I wish to think about. It’s not something I ever thought about before. You wipe till you’re clean than maybe a couple more just for good measure. No muss, no fuss. You flush, put everything back where it belongs, wash your hands and move on with your life. NEXT!

But see, that was with my right hand. My right hand is the hand that’s use to doing the dirty work and all the detailed work. Now, I’ve got to use my left hand. The hand that saw “Fine motor skills” on my body’s list of things to learn and decided that anything involving motors was way too complicated for it and instead rode it’s Harley to the pool hall for a couple of racks and a few beers.

This was going to be tricky. Worse, it was going to be potentially messy. Even more worse, I was going to have to think about what I was doing. This is not an area of my body I’ve given much thought to aside from the occasional “Whoa, what the hell did I eat yesterday?” kind of thinking. It was going to be tricky and very unfortunately, probably time consuming.

I can pretty much sum up the initial event with this: It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. It took longer. Everything now took longer. Showering, dressing, eating, they all took longer. Try making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with one hand and two arms. You can do it, it just takes longer and initially it may be a little messier, but you can still do it. Then as a little time goes by you get better at it. The key to the whole thing is this: You already know exactly what must be done and the steps that it’s going to take to get it done. Now, you’ve just got to do it. I did it. I can say without fear of reprisal that I did not however, particularly enjoy it.