The Road to Recovery

I never imagined that a broken finger took such a long recovery period. EVER!

The initial break wasn't too bad. I know what you're thinking if you saw the pictures, but it happened so quickly that I didn't have time to stress about it. For me, it was the three days following my ER visit that really kicked my butt. My fingers swelled up like sausages inside of a pretty tight cast, which obviously made my whole hand hurt.

My mom took me to the orthopedist the next day for some follow up. He checked out the x-rays, deemed the setting the ER doc did good, and told me to come back in nine days to see how I was healing. I was in tons of pain, so I was really happy he didn't mess with the finger.

The next day I had planned to attempt to go to work, but a new symptom hit me. I developed some severe chest pains every time I took a deep breath. Maybe I'm a little paranoid when it comes to my health, but I wanted to get it checked out. Mom drove me to another appointment. Apparently, I bruised some chest muscles when I smacked the pavement, so that was the cause of the additional pain. This was worse than the hand for a few days because it made every movement when I was laying in bed difficult and excruciating.

The next Friday, I had my next orthopedist appointment, and my finger was healing crooked. He schedule the surgery for the following Monday to place a pin in my finger. The surgery went smoothly (not like I would know if it didn't), and I got another cast that would stay on for an additional two weeks. Can I just say, having a cast is no fun?

Two weeks later the cast was cut off and the pin removed with no numbing whatsoever. Yikes! Actually, it didn't hurt at all.

Then, the therapy began, which I'll share more about later. Now for the good stuff...pictures.

1. Bruising and the somewhat crooked pinky before the surgery.

2. Freezing and ready for surgery.

3. Close up of the pin in my finger at the removal visit (it looked totally different than I imagined).

4. Another angle showing how bad I needed to exfoliate.

5. The hole after the pin removal.

The only thing I'm missing is a picture of my x-ray.