At 9 PM on January 18, 2022, I went to put our trash on the road. My wife Andrea and I had been watching something on TV. During a break between shows, I planned to take care of the trash while Andrea got ready for bed and put on a Muumuu. I moved our trash can next to our mailbox at the street. I was walking back across yard to the house and came to a transition from yard to driveway. This was not a huge step, and I should have been able to make it with no problem at all. Instead of stepping over this transition spot and planting my left leg firmly on the drive, I stepped putting the ball of my foot on the drive and the heel in the grass. As I put weight on my foot, my ankle twisted, and I lost my balance. I started falling forward but I also instinctively stepped forward to try and catch my balance. I knew I was going to fall but I kept going forward even though I knew my legs would never get under my body enough to regain balance.
I was lying on my belly in the driveway with my head facing the garage. My right arm was out in front of me over my head and I was staring at my wrist. The arm was obviously not straight. Especially around the wrist. I immediately thought about a guitar playing friend who I saw fall and break their wrist several years ago. I’m not sure exactly how I ended up in this position. From what I can piece together from the evidence, I wasn’t trying to break my fall with my right arm. It looks like I fell on my right arm, then bounced around enough to end up in the position I remember. There was also a broken pair of reading glasses next to me in the driveway. I can’t remember if I was wearing them or if they were in my shirt pocket. I don’t remember how I got up from the driveway or when I started supporting my broken arm with the other one, but I also picked up the broken pair of readers.
I came into the kitchen and started shouting to Andrea, “Don’t put on your Muumuu! We are going to the ER!” When she comes into the kitchen, she says, “Your head is bleeding!” My head had hit the pavement when I fell and I had a small cut on the right side of my forehead that was bleeding so slowly, I didn’t realize it was there. I replied to her, “My arm is broken!” I’m sure the sight of the blood made my head seem like a higher priority and head injuries are very serious. But when she looked at the arm, she realized that was going to be big. And I didn’t get knocked out or become disoriented because of hitting my head. I threw away the broken readers and we rushed to the hospital, arriving around 9:30 PM.
At the hospital, Andrea found a wheelchair to get me into the building. I was fine walking, but she was concerned that would get lightheaded and pass out. The check in process was relatively quick but the only thing they did was ask a few questions and check vitals. It was also a short wait before they took x-rays. I had been cradling my arm the whole time and was afraid of moving it too much to get the x-rays. They helped me place my arm on the table and used a rolled-up sheet to help support and position it. When I was done with the x-rays, they let me take the sheet to continue to support my arm during my wait.
As expected, the ER waiting room was full of characters. We started hearing stories about people who had been waiting over 10 hours to be seen. There was one lady that we understood had a concussion who had been there an extremely long time. She seemed to be a perfect candidate for someone who would be moved up on the priority list but not knowing her story, it was hard to know. There were people who had been there long enough that they were taking their vitals again to make sure nothing had changed. Some of the people would make regular trips to the desk to ask how long it would be. Our strategy was to never ask, but we sat close to the desk and tried to look as pitiful as possible to get sympathy from the people making decisions on how soon you get waited on.
As expected, there were several people there that had issues that could have been addressed by a regular doctor, but the people probably couldn’t afford to go to a regular doctor. Some of the people were there just to get COVID tests. There were people that were regulars that some of the staff knew by name. I heard a nurse walking through say “Hi, Peanut!” to one of the guys roaming around. There was a family there who had a family member already checked into the ER who was dying with COVID. They started with the regular ER/COVID protocol by only letting one of them up at a time but eventually let more go up to pay their last respects.
Even when I’m in a situation like this, I have a knack for attracting every looney-tunes person possible. Some man came up and introduced himself as Mr. King. Then he spelled it, K-I-N-G. He was from the same county where I grew up and was trying to see if he knew some of my family. He was annoying me, and I just closed my eyes. I was pretending to try and rest but I was trying to run him off. He was in and out of the waiting room, walking around trying to engage everyone in conversation. At some point, he came in with a plastic grocery bag that he found in the parking lot. He told us that he was told that he had heard that you weren’t supposed to put these over your head, but he didn’t see what the problem was. As he said this, he held the bag above his head. He proceeded to pretend like he was balancing the bag in the palm of his hand. He continued around the waiting room like a low-rent Patch Adams trying to amuse an unwilling audience. One of the staff finally got him redirected to another waiting room.
I was careful to hold my hand as steady as possible with very little shifting. About an hour into our wait, a shift occurred. It felt like bone on bone and open nerves touching things that didn’t need to be touched. I immediately broke into a sweat and felt close to passing out. It was the most pain that I had up to that point and since then relating to my arm. I told Andrea how I felt and asked her to get me a wet cloth to put on my head. The best she could find was a paper towel but that seemed to help enough. Now would be a good time to point out that I was not in a regular wheelchair. The chair that she was able to find when we got to the hospital didn’t have any arms. It was more like a balance beam on wheels with a back on it. This was the point in the night that arms would have nice to have on the chair. If I had passed out, I would have ended up in the floor. I didn’t intentionally move my arm to make the pain go away but it soon disappeared just like it appeared out of nowhere.
Shortly after 11 PM, much of the crowd in the waiting room cleared without being seen. I think most of them left because it got to be later than what they wanted to stay up just to see a doctor. I think this helped get me moved up on the list and I made it out of the waiting room around 11:30. They told me that my x-rays had been reviewed with a surgeon. They confirmed that I would ultimately need surgery, which I thought would be the case, and they planned to do an initial set of my arm there. They brought in some large equipment to use while they did the alignment. They would put me to sleep for a short time during this procedure. Because they were going to knock me out, they would need someone to administer the anesthesia. They also planned to have a couple of doctors there and two nurses during the procedure. They were short staffed so there was a long wait before they could get to me. While I tried to hold off as long as I could, the urge to pee hit me. Andrea helped with this difficult and messy process that happened several times before they were able to get to my arm.
It was during this wait that Andrea noticed some abrasions on the back of my right hand. Up until then, we thought that I might have tried to catch myself with my hand, causing my wrist to break. The marks indicated that I had fallen on top of my arm and hand. The bone in my arm didn’t break from me trying to stop my fall, it was crushed by the weight of my body. I had some scratches on the palm of my left hand showing that it hit the pavement, but it didn’t take the weight of the fall like my right arm.
At one point, they came into the room and gave me an option to splint my arm as it was and just send me home. I think there were a couple of reasons they gave me this option. First because I had been there a long time, they thought I might just be ready to get out of there. They thought I might be tired of waiting. The other thing is that I suspect they have metrics on how long it takes them to service patients in the ER. They felt this was a safe option since I would be coming back for surgery and the surgeon would ultimately put everything in place. As I considered my options, my main thought was a fear that if they splinted it like it was, there might be a possibility of the return of the extreme pain that I experienced in the waiting room. I didn’t want any possibility of that. The other consideration was that under normal circumstances, the plan would be to set my arm and send me home. I felt the smart thing to do is to wait and let them do what they would normally do.
After another hour or so, they finally gather enough of the right people to align my arm. A guy started giving me something in my IV to put me to sleep. I don’t think I was out very long but when I woke up, they were holding my hand up in the air and aligning my arm below. I don’t know if they had used the big piece of equipment in the corner to do anything but what I saw them doing looked like they didn’t use it at all. I was surprised that it was not causing me any pain. They had done a good job of making my arm numb. It also looked like it was something that would do more harm than good. They put a hard cast on the arm that included a splint that wrapped around my elbow. Before they would release me to go home, I had to wait for the anesthesia to wear off which added another hour to my stay. At this point, I didn’t have any additional pain medicine although they had sent a prescription to our pharmacy.
I was released around 5 AM. Even though we were extremely tired, we decided to stop for breakfast sandwiches on the way home. It was 5:30 AM when we got home. We ate and got in the bed around 6. We intended to get up as close to 8 AM as possible because that’s when the surgeon’s office opened. Andrea slept in our spare bedroom because she was afraid of hitting my arm. We didn’t set an alarm to help us get up because we also wanted some rest. I woke up around 8:40 but wasn’t ready to get up. 20 minutes later I decided it was time to get up. At exactly 9 AM, I used our Amazon Alexa system to drop into the other bedroom so I could talk to Andrea. At exactly the same time, our Roomba vacuum started. I thought that for some reason, my command had started the vacuum. We do have the vacuum set for voice control with Alexa. But it was also our regular day for vacuuming and 9 AM was the normal start time.
We were able to get an appointment with the surgeon scheduled for early that afternoon. It took us the rest of the morning to get cleaned up and dressed to get out of the house. We had intended to go the pharmacy to pick up my pain medicine and eat before the doctor’s appointment, but we took too long getting ready. We had to drive directly to the surgeon’s office. No food and no medicine. The surgeon was the same doctor that had done a knee replacement on my dad the previous year. He set me up to do the surgery the next morning. I would be the second patient on his schedule and the other surgery would be short. He thought I would need more powerful pain medicine than what they had prescribed at the hospital, so he wrote me a second prescription for a more powerful dose of the same medication. As we left his office, we were instructed to call the hospital immediately to set up pre-admission. We were still hungry and sat in the parking lot trying to decide where to eat while we called the hospital. They told us to come immediately for pre-admission. We told them we wanted to grab something to eat first, but they said to come straight there because they were getting ready to go home for the day. So that’s what we did. Still no food or pain medicine.
From past experience at the hospital, I was certain that if I asked for something to eat and drink while we were in that waiting room, they would bring me something. When we asked for food, they gave me a Coke and peanut butter crackers which is exactly what I expected. It helped with my hunger, but I was cotton-mouthed which I think was from anesthetic. During the pre-admission, they took my vitals and asked the normal questions. The only problem I ran into was when they sent me for a urine sample. I didn’t have any assistance holding the cup or screwing the lid on with one hand. Our trip home included a side trip to the pharmacy to get all my prescriptions. I wouldn’t take any before the surgery because of the instructions from the doctor. Our youngest daughter was off work for the next couple of days and came into town to help tend to us. When we arrived at home, she had the largest box of chicken tenders she could get from a fast-food restaurant near our house. The rest of our kids came over to check on us.
I went to bed as soon as we were done eating because we had to be at hospital at 5:30 AM. We originally planned to get up at 5 and just to the hospital without cleaning up but the pre-surgery instructions said I needed to shower in Gold dial soap that morning. We changed plans to get up at 4:30. The Instructions actually directed us to shower the night before too in Dial gold soap, but I fell asleep before that could happen. Was running on less than 3 hours sleep from previous night.
There were no issues getting to the hospital and the surgery went well. On January 20, The doctor put a plate and 11 screws in my arm. There was one small fragment that was too small to put a screw in. The doctor said the way the bone turned when it broke was in the opposite direction of how they usually break. We think this because it broke from me falling on it instead of me catching myself. They did a nerve block on my arm so it would be completely numb during the surgery. This was also to reduce the pain. I was numb but couldn’t use the arm at all after surgery. When I woke from surgery, I was talking about Wheel of Fortune even when I got to the recovery room. I was having dreams that involved this game show that I never watch. When I was getting dressed to leave, I took off the sling holding my arm. I had no control of my arm because of the nerve block. I caught it before it yanked. The new cast was not a hard one but was made up of a splint, padding around it and bandage.
We got home reasonably early. I was able to get in bed and finally get pain medication. My daughter was able to tend to me while I rested. Unfortunately, Andrea had to spend some time that day dealing with some business relating to her dad who had passed away on Thanksgiving. She wasn’t able to get rest until that night.
My two-week visit to the doctor was on February 4. He put me in a hard cast to help hold the bone fragment in place that was too small to hold with a screw. There was originally discussion of me getting out of all casts at 2 weeks, but I wasn’t comfortable with my arm out of a cast for the short time I was without one. I was happy with my hard, red cast.
I returned to Dr. Knight on February 4. And changed to a hard cast. They wanted me in a cast for another 2 weeks to allow the fragment that couldn’t be screwed in to be held in place and grow. When they took off the initial cast, my arm didn’t feel ready to be out of a cast. I was happy with the hard cast. I went with red. My next two-week appointment was on February 18 when they transitioned me from the cast to a wrist brace. It was nice to be able to take a shower without worrying about getting a cast wet. On March 4, the doctor told me not to wear the brace anymore but sent me for 3 weeks of therapy. I had lost a lot of range of motion in my wrist. My grip strength was also seriously diminished. This is a big blow to anyone but as a guitarist and pianist, it could have a big impact on my ability to play. While the therapy sessions only lasted three weeks, I’m continuing to do exercises daily. I was released by the doctor on April 29. While the bone has been repaired and sufficiently healed, I still have swelling and occasional pains. My range of motion and strength continue to improve. I was picking around at my guitar and the piano even before I was out of the first cast. I’m able to play both instruments about as good as I could ever play. I know I still have a way to go to get completely healed. When I look at the scar on my wrist, it still looks red, like it’s not completely healed. I imagine that’s how the bones and muscles are inside my arm too. I’m thankful for the progress I’ve made and look forward to getting much better. I’m learning to play songs I’ve never played before.