What is protected
My bike ride yesterday made me think about recovery, both physical and mental.
I had a serious accident and I needed surgery to recover from it. The bones then needed time to heal. In practical terms, bones take six to eight weeks to heal enough to be whole.
The soft tissue damage takes much longer. When I snapped my radius in half, I only stopped the physiotherapy five months after the cast and k-wires were finally removed and another 13 or so months before the bone stopped hurting.
18 months plus the 8 weeks in a cast.
Because the radius is a major bone, capable of supporting weight, I naively thought that the bones in my face would take much less time.
Guessing that’s not the case?
Obviously, I had the fixation plate for the zygomatic removed (actually the plate was between the cracked line on the image from Wikipedia and the “frontal” label), which has stopped it catching on my facial muscles round the eye while re-injuring the bone. It’s healing really well though I am very conscious of it when I am tired.
The maxillary sinus break was a bit more of an impact initially. This has probably healed the best although there is some nerve damage. When I close my jaw, I get a stab of pain which is again much worse when I am tired.
The muscles and nerves seem to have recovered (again the op’ to remove the fixation plate has put things back a little but now the swelling has gone down, my smile is much more even without having to concentrate on it).
The thing that still bothers me in my upper set of teeth. All my own, although the front incisor broke its root in the accident, so my first filling ever was root canal work. My dentist is a marvel.
My skin seems to have healed well, a couple of white patches from where I lost a couple of layers of skin on my back but otherwise not too bad.
Not 100% sure I see the chase of this post?
With hindsight, I should have taken a couple of months off to heal. During this period, at work a colleague new to the team asked the question, “how old do you think I am?” He is less mature than he looks and when you feed back your estimate, he offers to “rearrange your face”.
I don’t remember my accident, but having had my face rearranged, I think that’s quite a nasty thing to say to someone for something so trivial.
At least I now know that wasn’t a personal threat to me as he did this to someone else while I was present a couple of weeks ago.
Posted: November 13th, 2018 under 42.