I'm baaaaaaaaack!!!!!

I guess I should back up to that since I never even got around to blogging about it.  Back on October 29th, Derek and I had been at a wedding and were both in our closet getting ready to change into our pj's.  I asked him to take my boots off (as I always do), and was standing and holding on to the shoe shelf when he began to pull them off.  The first one came off just fine, but when he went to pull the 2nd, my other foot (that was in a sock) slid along the carpet toward him (away from the shelf I was holding on to) and BOOM, I went down.  Somehow my left arm got caught underneath me and the radius, right at the wrist joint, snapped.  It was obvious immediately that it was broken and broken badly, so after calling a neighbor to come stay with the kids (thank you Melissa!), and several minutes of dragging myself up off the closet floor and practically crawling to the car, we were off to the hospital.  Long story short(er), they admitted me that evening, did surgery the next day to put it back together and then I got home on Halloween, just in time to hang with my cute Wizard of Oz characters.

The next few weeks were a blur of pain meds, having to ask for help with EVERYTHING, physical therapy, and well, to be honest, misery.  You don't realize how very necessary an arm is until you lose the use of it for a bit.  I can't help but be thankful though, that it was my left arm and not right, because things would have been SO much worse had that been the case.  I am also thankful for my husband, who stepped up as always to do what had to be done, and our neighbors and friends who helped during that time, as well.

So, fast forward to now, 10 weeks later, and I'm still battling the break.  At my 6 week follow-up, I was diagnosed with RSD, a condition where the sympathetic nervous system in my left arm was in hyperdrive and was preventing it from being able to heal normally.  I've been getting weekly nerve block injections in my neck (under sedation, thankfully), which have helped tremendously, but I am still battling some swelling and have limited mobility in my wrist and fingers.  I hope that with continued therapy, I'll get most of the use back, but am starting to come to terms with the fact that my hand may never be "normal" again.  The surgeon who repaired my arm called the break "wicked" and I think that term pretty much sums up what this entire experience has been like.  I know that in the grand scheme of life, I could be dealing with something a WHOLE lot worse though, and I am thankful more than ever for my healthy body, which I certainly took for granted before this happened.

I didn't want to see the x-ray of my wrist pre-surgery, so I don't have any pics of that to share (you're welcome), but here is the "after" look with the new hardware.

I hope y'all are doing well, I've missed the bloggy world and will do my best to catch up here and check in with all of you soon.  How the heck did 2012 get here so fast?!?!?!