The story of broken arm, part three
So the pain relief looked like it was going to be really painful and where was Jon?
The nurse caught my face and twigged what was going through my brain: “no, you drink this one :-)”
I laughed and downed the syringe that was handed to me. Morphine would definitely either make me not care it was hurting or would stop the pain. That sounded great to me.
“Twenty minutes, half an hour then we can dose you up with some local and relocate the radius. It is almost certainly going to hurt very badly and you are going to hate me, but hopefully it will mean you don’t have any problems later on.”
Jon was back from the car, having checked on our son too and I lay my head on his lap. Hopefully we’d be home in an hour. Relocate, plaster, x-ray, home. Easy, right.
As one of the oldest and best performing forms of analgesia morphine does knock me out. When the nurse came back and did the injection for the local anaesthetic, I didn’t really feel the needle go into the gap between the ulna and radius. I happily moved to the room where the nurse would try to realign my bone and got comfortable though I had this nagging thought that despite the painkiller the next 10 minutes of my life were going to be excruciatingly painful.
The nurse treating me had found a buddy, nearly twice the size of the original (I thought babushka and thought this is not the time to laugh), he looked concerned at my husband. “You’re not going to like me: this is going to be really horrible to watch,” which Jon shrugged off 😮
So the big guy holds me by the upper arm, fixing my elbow. The other nurse held my wrist firmly and pulls and twists until there really is a popping sound. When that happened, he put the arm onto a back board and starts to plaster it up. When the plaster is dry, they’ll check it with a x-ray but all being well I should be on the home straight. After the plaster is on, I realise it didn’t hurt – man those were good painkillers!
The x-ray showed it was a great realignment, which the nurse was really chuffed about. There was a 19:20 chance it would dislocate itself while healing, apparently this doesn’t happen with pre-teens and the under 70s. If it stayed put, two to four weeks and I should be right as rain. Two weeks would mean I could take my bike down to France for the holiday I had booked – nothing like having something to aim for to help the healing process 😉
Come back in on Tuesday for an x-ray and keep up with the pain killers.
Posted: March 28th, 2010 under Skates.