30 September 2006
One-Armed Bandit
Friday morning I got a call from the urgent care facility. A radiologist had reviewed my x-rays and found a fracture. The doctor I had seen on Wednesday told me this might happen – they don’t have a radiologist in the building so everything gets reviewed. They told me to come back in to get a different sling – a “sling and swathe” – and to make an appointment with orthopedics.
Due to bad timing (why can’t we schedule all accidents for first thing Monday morning?), I still don’t know when I’ll see the specialist, but I do have my sloth (as i will now call it, having initially misheard “swathe”). Because the urgent care is affiliated with a different hospital than my primary care, I spent much of Friday afternoon calling around trying to get a referral and an appointment. To further compound the hassle, the two systems seem to use different terminology for this particular injury, so I feel like I’m in the middle of a particularly bad (parlor) game of telephone. (And yes, i had the urgent care folks spell it for me, so I can’t blame this on my ears!)
From what I understand, my shoulder fracture is in the top of the upper arm bone near the shoulder joint (proximal humerus). Based on a little reading I’ve done, I might be in this contraption for a month. The prospect of surgery is worse, though, so I won’t complain (yet – I reserve the right to start whining in a few weeks!) – especially since my arm immobilized feels much better than my arm trying to move to avoid frozen shoulder.
There are some pretty cool videos of the shoulder carriage in motion at this site (Christopher Evans 3D).
Meanwhile, I’m thinking of changing my halloween costume (from panda) to “one armed bandit”! :*)
Jonski Blogski 
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