How I broke My Arm
How I broke My Arm
Ulnar and Radial ORIF: The Full Story (Feb 16)
The world can feel like it’s trying to test you in very specific, small, ridiculous ways. I learned that on a hotel sidewalk.
So I’m staying at a hotel at the time due to FEMA displacement. I am sitting in the accessible smoking area in my wheelchair. The sidewalk is elevated about six inches, maybe a foot, from the ground. There are two benches, bins, and not to mention ICE because it’s February in Appalachia so ICE is literally raining from the sky. The math was simple: Go from the place my wheelchair is parked near the door of the hotel (which is locked from the outside and my Partner has the key), to the ramp, down the ramp, and to the car when my partner pulls up.
To my right, between me and the ramp, is a Dancing lady, who I will refer to as DL. She headphones in, and Spanish music blasting. Luckily I speak spanish, sorta. I did like 6 years of it, and can do conversational. So I wave, I say Hello. Whe exchange some pleasentries in broken spanish / english on both sides. The interaction is nice. I see our car coming around the corner and move to wheel myself towards the ramp. She doesn’t adjust and is in the middle of the sidewalk, still dancing. I try several forms of excuse me, and when spanish and english didn’t work, I even desperately tried ASL, and charades. Nothing.
So I decide to try to go around her. It looks like there’s enough room, though with my blindness and depth perception issues, I can see in post how my judgement was most likely way off. Physics reminds me gravity exists in the rudest way possible and I go tumbling off the sidewalk to the left as my wheel catches the lip. There’s no time to react, I’m going down sideways and I know it. I don’t know how I have this much memory for such a short nanosecond. But time seemed to slow down and the memory is so vivid even now.
I put my left hand out because I knew I was going down, and I wanted to try to catch myself so my head wouldn’t hit the ground. Like I said, I was going down sideways, so there wasn’t a way to get out of the chair. It couldn’t fall forward. I just had to take the fall on my left side. So I accounted for that and focused on protecting my head, and I put my left arm out.
My left arm, or well, my hand didn’t really make it to the ground. My arm was down, like I was going to wheel myself, kind of out to the side, and the armrest of the wheelchair was between my chest and my arm. It was wedged in between the two. I remember first feeling my forearm catch me, and I thought, oh, okay, maybe it’ll just be a few scrapes, maybe it won’t be too bad.
And before that thought could even finish, I didn’t feel or hear anything, my arm just gave way. I don’t know how else to put it. I fell through my arm. One moment I was resting on it, and the next, I had gone through it.
All of this was happening while my partner was pulling the car around, because I had moved when I saw her. She put the car in park, pulled the e-brake, and rushed over to me. She was getting to me just as I was realizing, oh shit, I broke my arm, and trying to sit myself up for the first time.
Meanwhile DL is jumping down the sidewalk and screaming, “Are you okay? Chair! Chair!”
Cat and I literally ignored her, pretended she wasn’t there, and sped off to the hospital with her still saying chair like a broken record. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
With Cat’s help, we got me out of the chair and onto my butt on the concrete. My arm just flopped. It didn’t hurt. I picked my arm up, and it should have raised, and it didn’t. It just flopped. I think that’s when I screamed “I broke my arm I’m dying” at Cat, and she jumped into motion, saying no you aren’t dying, let’s get to the hospital. So I supported the break with my other arm to keep the bones in place, because I knew they would have to be set, and I knew the less movement there was, the better it would be for me and for the medical team.
She helped me awkwardly stand and shuffle to the car, load’s me in, and then packs up the wheelchair and away we go.
Everything was panicked until we got in the car. The hospital wasn’t too far away, so the ride was quieter. The pain started to kick in on the drive, and so most of it was just pain management and stabilization. Oh and my service dog was in the backseat. He was so good, and behaved so well, sometimes I forget he was even there for it.
The three of us went in, and everything kind of fades out around the time I get to the hospital. My memory starts to blur the closer it gets to surgery. I remember they had to cut my clothing off me. I was wearing a really thick winter onesie and a really thick sweatshirt, and they had to cut both of them off at the shoulder.
I remember they couldn’t get one of the X-rays. They could only get two, because they couldn’t position my arm the way they needed to. It just wouldn’t go. I remember getting back to the room and them saying, “You’re probably going to have to have surgery. We’ll probably keep you overnight.”
And then they came back to adjust my medication and said, “No, actually, the surgeon just looked at your films. We’re going to do surgery right now. Like, right now. We’re going to prep you right now.”
I was like, oh. Okay.
I had a bit of a panic attack pre-op. And then I was waking up.
I don’t even know how to put it. It was just surreal.
I woke up: a cyborg. I needed two metal plates and several screws. One plate per bone. Apparently, I completely snapped both of them in half. The medical jargon is “ Both bones comminuted, shortened, angulated, displaced, mid-shaft Forearm, left, closed fractures.” Went back to recover IN OUR HOTEL ROOM, because again, FEMA Hotel, in a splint and sling up to almost my shoulder. After they removed my staples I was casted for a week or two, and then back to splints and slings. Now I use a lot of braces, compression, and support clothing. My copper compression sleeves are my daily go to, but I use them all in rotation.
We talked to the hotel to see if we could get the CCTV, just in case. We spoke to personal injury Lawyers: “No case.” We wanted to file a Police Report but they wouldn’t even let us. Rage simmers quietly at the injustice of being hurt in an “accessible” space and dismissed. But time moves on. This brief anger phase leaves me the fastest.
My already broken sleep get’s even more fragmented. You ever tried sleeping or bathing in a full arm cast? It isn’t fun. And now I have a shower cover for a cast that I used for two weeks. Yay for next time I guess? My dreams, which have always been realistic and weird, got even more distorted.
Cat is always there. She tries to hide her own exhaustion behind her routine, but I see her and the new strain. It’s unavoidable, but I tell her everyday how much I appriciate her gentleness. Needing help using the toilet and getting dress puts life in perspective. Buddy learns too. He’s still 3 and in the middle of SDIT training, so we just added to the roster. He learned no more diving into Dad’s arm like a cat, retraining instinct. No sleeping on the arm, no pawing at it. We can’t alert that arm anymore, alert dad’s back or legs. But he learns. He even adapts some on his own, bringing toys to me gently for me to play still, walking me to the bathroom when Cat isn’t around. He’s always at my wheels and heels.
At a post op checkup a few months in, I tell them my thumb still numb. That my Index finger wakes sporadically. We get OT/PT scheduled because they want to help me preserve my dexterity and ROM. Nerve healing is weird, wacky, and painful.
My Fitbit: I’ve worn a health tracking watch on that left wrist for years. I was wearing it that day. I took it off in the car on the way to hospital and left it on a shelf. One day I picked it up and swapped the settings and put it on my right wrist. A small independence restored, a small acceptance and step forwards.
The weird dreams never stop. They actually get weirder. Dreams intertwine trauma with alternate universes: me returning to high school with a prosthetic leg instead of a broken arm. A prosthetic arm at an amusement park. My subconscious working through layers of trauma, fear, and adaptation.
The arm itself does strange things as nerves heal and readjust. It will squeeze objects too hard when I hold them, drop them, and sometimes acts like it’s going to but then auto-corrects before I notice. I only notice AFTER. Brain and hardware miscommunicating. My internal body map is so far thrown I wonder if Jupiter saw it fly by.
I could no longer do my self injections. Cat and I had very long talks weighing the options. She agreed to learn how to inject for me, and she did. She has done every injection for me since the surgery, I still haven’t relearned the stability needed. I even gave consent that she can do my HRT shot while I nap. She does a few times when the sleep apnea just doesn’t want me awake.
Buddy has some humor in a few of his adaptations. Buddy started bapping Cat for alerts when confused, or when he doesn’t think its safe to bap me, because he knows she will help.
There is gradual improvement. I can pet Buddy, hold Cat’s hand, type, play, sing. Consistency is hard, and I tire fast and easy for physical activity. My wrist doesn’t fully rotate anymore. It’s like learning how to use an arm all over again. But at near 30.
Question: y’know how amputees deal with phantom pain? As a Fibro and mystery chronic illness crew member post-ORIF, I feel like I relate. Maybe a little too hard. Maybe it has to do with my dreams with the twisting hands and amputated legs in high school post-surgery. Maybe it’s real? Maybe it’s all in varying degrees. I don’t know.
When I first was recovering and still had steri-strips, I often found myself rubbing a wet wipe gently on the numb parts, just to try to jerk the nerves back into shape and “feel” something. It didn’t always work, but it helped.
Nowadays, there are similar things, but I can’t think of them all. One is like, when I stretch. I stretch both arms out like a T. And I REALLLLLY want to rotate and pop my wrist. So bad. I NEEED to WANT it. It’s so uncomfortable. But… it can’t. It doesn’t anymore. I still can’t move it as far up/left as I can down/right (at the wrist). So I can’t do the wrist circles stretch on the left anymore, but I can on the right. So I do the T pose and then move my right arm until my left feels better. It helps, for a bit.
I’ve talked ’til I’m blue in the face about my time in med school, though I always follow it up with: LIMITED, SHORT, and NEVER LICENSED. I was supposed to transfer from pre-nursing to nursing the year I had to quit. But damn, I know a good lot of biology, anatomy, and body science. Plus, isn’t every long term chronic illness crew member just their own at home nurse? But I digress.
I’ve seen medical shows, which we all know are 1100% accurate to real life, right? (Sarcasm.) But they touch on topics sometimes with some amount of truth. I remember an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where the blonde surgeon, who got a leg amputation, was just returning to surgery. Her “leg” was hurting, and she was having trouble standing, so she had a colleague stab her “foot” (prosthetic) to tell her brain it WASN’T THERE, so she could do the surgery. And, like… yea. I fucking get that now.
To be more accurate and bring this concept into my own reality, let me phrase it this way. Since my ORIF, I’ve had persistent sensory motor mismatch in my left wrist. I get a strong urge to complete movements my joint can no longer perform. Bilateral movement and sensory input help, which makes me think this is altered body schema and central sensitization.
Less medically, it feels similar to phantom limb mechanisms, but localized to a limb with reduced range and altered nerve signaling.
Enjoy MY xrays.
Orthopedic Surgery Operative Notes
Date of Surgery: 2/16/2025
Procedure: Open reduction internal fixation of left both bone forearm fracture
Operative Findings: Both bones comminuted, shortened, angulated, displaced, mid-shaft Forearm, left, closed fractures.
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