TRIGGER WARNING!
I thought you might like to see how my hand is healing after the mishap I had last Wednesday (there are comparison pictures of my hand at this link and pictures of the scene here). In short, when I was trying to break a fall, my hand went through a pane of glass on my office bookcase, causing two deep lacerations that required 18 stitches in toto.
Every day the lacerations are dressed, which involves putting Neosporin on the gashes and then taping a gauze pad over them. I keep my hand dry and when I shower I put it in two plastic bags secured with two rubber bands around my wrist. Try washing your hair that way, or washing your right armpit when your left hand is encased in plastic bags!
Anyway, it appears to be healing okay, with no signs of infection except a slight redness, and, fortunately, the flap of skin in the first photo did not die (the nurse practitioner told me that was a possibility).
I get the stitches removed Friday morning.
x
Looks good boss! Nice and clean, no infection! Here’s to your health! 🙂
Yes. Your hard work of staying clean and dry is paying off. More healing to you.
Glad to hear it. Isn’t Neosporin great? It’s always awkward, though, dressing your own hand.
I have a kindly helper!
Let the air get to it!
👍
Stitch that!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YoAGehVdwbQ
Great to see healthy progress – this event made me pay particular attention to such matters, especially glass panels of cabinets and where they are located – not to mention plastic bags. Thanks for sharing. Keep up the careful attention.
Loved the “Trigger” warning (Trigger was my 85-year-old mother’s nickname back in the day as her maiden name was Trigg).
Glad to see that everything is healing well. Very best wishes.
A great great grandma of mine was a Trigg…
Aargh! Don’t say that we’re actually related, Dommy!
Looks good to me. I see there is some bruising too that is turning yellow/green. No surprise. Glad to know you’re not in any pain (assuming that’s still the case since you said you weren’t in pain a couple days ago).
A really long time ago I broke a hand doing something really stupid, playing football. It is amazing how much you miss that hand. Pretty much gave up the game after that.
I met a guy wanted to dribble beer on my banged up finger years ago. Said it would fix it. But consult your doctor. 😏
I was badly burned in a high school chemistry class in 1966 and almost lost my hand but a new treatment, “Neosporin,” spray saved it! Somewhere there is a med journal article chronicling my good luck. Keep slathering it on – it works!
You achieved medical immortality AND KEPT YOUR HAND! Lucky! Sounds horrible though…
Happy Trails there, big guy.
It’s actually looking pretty good! It’s especially good that the flap on the pad of the thumb is settling back in.
GCM
Did you count your stitches?
Looks like 6 on the upper left side of the hand — but they are hard to count.
And I think I count 12 on the underside near the base of your thumb.
Last time I got stitched up I got 6 stitches on my forehead, & 6 on my right hand.
I was chatting up the stitcher — a woman — about how many stitches I would end up with.
She said, “We will see.”
As she stitched away we talked about odd & even numbers.
She said she liked even numbers — I, on the other hand, like odd numbers.
We ended up with 6 on each lesion!
Later, when my doctor was taking them out, & I asked her about the numbers of stitches.
She said — “Five would have done nicely in each spot.”
So Jerry glad that your hand can once more point to idiocy and grasp difficult concepts, but just for our information, how much did the repairs cost you, with and without insurance?
I will give out the total hospital bill when it comes, but it’s a bit of a personal question to ask me how much I paid out of my own pocket.
Sorry Jerry. It’s just that we Europeans cannot for the life of us understand why Americans have to pay absurd amounts to cope with routine accidents.
Because we’re stupid and selfish! I will disclose the total bill, which will be far more than I have to pay.
Hell, medicare paid over $11,000 for two nights and three days in the hospital when I had covid in Jan. No operation, or anything – just ICU I guess.
Many of us Americans can’t figure it out either.
My brother is starting immunotherapy for stage 3c cancer from a melanoma. Right now, he’s trying to get his “top-shelf” insurance to pay for it as they are declining at the moment. It’s $60,000 a treatment (which consists of a 1/2 hour IV once a month for 12 months). So $720,000 for the year. That’s our great life-saving healthcare here in America. I can see why so many millions die in this country since healthcare prices are geared toward the top 10%. Another glaring example of class warfare in this country.
Absolutely outrageous. As others have said, the rest of the world, especially the developed world, fails to understand why the US healthcare system works this way. I wrote a post about it a while back. The evidence is that healthcare would be much cheaper, and just as good, if healthcare was free for all. One of the big advantages the US has is that it can look at the rest of the world and take the best bits from each system in developing its own. None of us claims our system is perfect, but all of us would say we’re better off than most USians.
Your nieces would kiss it better if they could!
Awww!
Yikes! I’m glad it’s healing well. You’re a real trooper for typing through this…
It’s a damn good thing the cuts happened where they did; just a few inches in another direction and your wrist could have been slashed. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you should be grateful (to whom/what? Nothing but luck, really) that the lacerations weren’t positioned in a far worse and possibly deadly place.
That looks like it is coming along nicely. The fun part is when it starts to really itch.
Though it gives me the heeby jeebies, I had to look.
Glad you are healing well and that you didn’t sustain any permanent injury to your hand.
Glad to see your hand is taken care of, but I’m worried about that toenail! Big toe, left foot – you should get that looked at! 😉
That is an old injury; on the day I moved into my office here, the building manager and I were moving my heavy oak desk into my office, and it dropped on that toe, completely severing the bone and leaving a huge bleeding gash (I fainted with the pain). When I got to the hospital, the doctor finally injected anesthetic into my toe and pulled off the entire nail with the equivalent of pliers (I fainted again). She told me the nailbed was destroyed and the nail would never be the same again. And it hasn’t. It’s been since 1987 that I’ve had that malformed nail.
I know someone who had that happen – it seems merely really bad, but is in fact absolutely BRUTAL – the sympathetic response for me is to become slightly nauseous and cry…
It’s encouraging to see that healing is taking its course. I had a couple of fingers crushed about twenty years ago and had to clean them and keep them in plastic for quite a while. It was the only time in my life that I didn’t do dishes by hand. And the only time a dishwasher machine was worth the bother of using….
P.S. I learned to type with only eight fingers afterwards. The crushed digits are so damaged that it’s impossible. It’s become second nature and only seeing the above comments reminded me of this. Oh, and I somehow never got itching during recovery. Here’s hoping PCC/e won’t have itching either
Just for the record, after the first bit one should leave the wound clean and dry. Occasionally a patient will over-do it with the neosporin ointment and come to get stitches removed but the wound is still ‘wet’ and the edges haven’t healed together. Yours looks fantastic though.
Speaking of Trigger, rumour has it (diverting the subject to the initial two words and pic) that Dale Evans was sort-of-hoping that maybe Roy Rogers would pass away (in Usian speak) a bit before her, once she heard that Roy was having him (a stallion, not a mare, IIRC) stuffed and mounted in his bedroom (“mounted” here neither the more common horsey meaning of course, nor the sexual one).
Good luck to Jerry with the healing. I’ve noticed quite clearly the slowing down of healing with age, being an absent-minded academic–e.g. while fixing my car, I somehow managed to break the very tip of the bone in my longest right-hand finger last August. My shin skin is mostly scars at the age of 80. So I make strenuous efforts not to fall off the roof when pushing snow off the solar panels.
…re the trigger warning, I’m fine with these sort of things, it’s the spider pics that give me the heebie jeebies…
Sorry I pray you heal completely very soon
On Facebook the trigger warning didn’t work! The picture isn’t of Trigger, but the first hand pic! Lucky I’m not squeamish!