I don't come on FB often because generally I have not a lot of news and I don't actually have a clue who reads my posts lol. More so lately is because I don't have a fully functioning left hand.
Mid-December I presented myself to Palm Bay Hospital here where I live because of an injury to my hand. A horrifying blood curdling screaming type hand injury where my fingers hyper extended backwards. They took an x-ray, said oh, it's just a sprain, but admitted me to the hospital for 4 days so they could test my head and heart, which isn't what I went for. They treated the pain, horribly splinted it, and sent me home with no orders.
I followed up with my primary doc on xmas eve, hurting sooo bad, sent me on my way with no scripts and a promise i'll get a referral to a hand clinic. Waited a long time for no referral to come in, and the pain and ability to move my left hand got about 100x worse.
I had to go to Melbourne Regional Hospital, they took and xray, still no broken bones, but they recognized the protruding mess in my palm so they took action and got me into a specialist 1.5 days later. At 6 weeks, today I went in, something that should have been operated on ASAP to no more than 7-10 days later and easily seen with other diagnostics during my stupidly long hospital stay, is now inoperable and you can spin this 10 different ways but i'm never going to have tendons magically reattach themselves and loss of function in my left hand will likely be a rest of life thing.
This affects everything I do, but the worst is typing, I can't hold my camera, grip a steering wheel, hold playing cards, and more. There are other tears in my ligaments but those could heal. I'm forever in excruciating pain because well, this is Florida, the "I don't care if you are dying of cancer, you don't get pain meds" type of state.
I don't know how this injury will affect the rest of my life, because well, nothing can be done. My hand is stiff, clamps down, and I cried to death today when they told me there was nothing they could do because the hospital failed to act in a timely manner and so did my primary care doctor. This injury was fixable, but now it is not. I was told to stop wearing the splint as it's pointless (I question that) and to have some OT which, not sure how that fixes something that is destroyed permanently, and referred out to a pain management clinic so I can get hooked on opioids. Yeah, that's not my style.
I actually wanted the gruesome surgery. I cried and freaked out when the doc started manipulating my middle finger and ring finger and clearly a lot bruised. Said I have nerve damage too. It's not been fun, and I've not been a fun person to be around and trying to get others to understand what suffering feels like is pretty difficult.
Pic 1 is the MRI where you clearly see the snapped tendon, pic 2 is my open hand, and pic 3 is about how good I close my hand without help.
Originally posted on Facebook on January 30, 2020.
