Explore europe in a campervan

Last week the doctor finally took off my plaster after 9 weeks in a cast!  This for an injury that is supposed to take 6-8 weeks to heal.  He didn’t really look at the latest xray - lucky really because I couldn’t discern any progress whatsoever from the last xray alongside.  No broken skin to report this time from that evil little circular saw they use (last time I had 3 cuts around my thumb).So what did I do next?  I went snowboarding!  The doctor didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no - he just made noises like ‘ppfffff’ which I took to mean, ‘It’s possibly not a great idea - if you fall on it your bone might just snap again.’  But I had been sent to the pharmacy to buy a (very expensive) wrist support and we were due to go on a day trip to Chamonix two days later to board with some friends of Simon’s.

(Random pictures to make this look more interesting)

I realised while putting on my snowboarding gear that it was going to be difficult to say the least.  My bad hand was just so weak that I had trouble putting on my other wrist guard and gloves, let alone doing my boots up tight enough and getting in and out of my snowboard bindings.  But we took the Supermorzine bubble-lift up to have a go and see how it felt.  I did manage one run but Simon had to do my bindings up, the chair lift scared me and I didn’t feel like I could really go for fear of falling and doing some further damage.  Chamonix was out of the question.  I’m going to wait a week or so before trying again.

Now that I’m plaster-free and unrestricted I’ve got a lot of work to do to regain strength and mobility in my hand, wrist and forearm.  It’s quite strange to see my hand baggy and empty where there used to be muscles.  Take a look at your hand - at the base of the thumb is a big muscle and also down the opposite side of the palm.  I found a good set of exercises here.  The doctor simply advised bending it all the ways it doesn’t want to go and doing that under warm, running water which I suppose loosens the tendons that need to learn to stretch again.

I got some good advice from Rab’s mate, Andy, who was visiting.  ‘Use the hell out of it’.  This advice from someone who almost lost his hand in an accident in a forgery at 16 years old while doing his apprenticeship to be a blacksmith, yet through sheer determination and hard work rehabilitated himself and has a great career and business as a blacksmith now!  I’m doing exercises pretty much all day long and making use of my Mum’s squishy pig!

Not many pictures of a broken arm so here are some others including the police-pig.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Diary, Snowboarding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.