Painful Lessons (continued)

I left the hospital the day after my operation, with a fine case of delirium tremans as can be imagined. Morphine and I do not mix well and after a hallucinatory and uncomfortable night, I was happy to be heading for home.

My right hand was swollen, scarred, achy - wrapped in coban (a nice, tight-fitting elastic bandage designed to reduce swelling - originally developed for race horses. Gad, the things you pick up....) and splinted over at an angle that, while it relaxed the flexor tendons in my fingers, made me look like an extra in a Bangles video (you know - Walk Like an Egyptian). 38 stitches across two fingers. The original laceration was only two stitches, the rest were courtesy of the surgeons.

Zachery roamed around the house for several days with exaggerated delicacy, stepping widely around my splinted hand and on at least one occasion, evicting his mother from her favorite spot on the couch so Dad could sit and prop up his hand.

The disruption around the house was fairly significant. One of my key roles as a father to an only child is plainly to serve as chief playmate and all-around entertainment centre for Zack. This role was monumentally disrupted as I was unable to play basketball, wrestle, whack each other with sticks, draw cartoons, play video games, rough-house or generally cause havoc with pillows. In short, Zack found his entertainment options suddenly curtailed - a fact that made him quite frustrated, once the novelty of Dad's sock puppet-like splint had worn off.

My injury was equally taxing on my wife. Unable to drive with the splint, and limited in my ability to do most housework (heh), my wife had to pull double-duty - and ferry me to physiotherapy almost daily for the first two weeks.

The splint came off after six weeks (and the stiches came out - painfully) , but my mobility with my hand has been still fairly curtailed until September. Since then I have regained some flexing capability but one of the two damaged fingers shows no sign of bending, mainly due to the thick scar tissue making the repaired tendons "stick". Therapy is still ongoing, with twice-weekly trips to the hospital outpatient hand clinic, ultrasound treatments, visits with the plastic surgeon (who still keeps dropping these maddeningly off-hand, matter-of-fact observations "Hmmm, that's stuck pretty good.") and, most recently, the surreal experience of electro-shock treatment for the muscles - a process that saw my arm hooked up to an electrical stimulator that caused my hand and fingers to clench all on there own...

In short, it has been an unpleasant experience (so - practice knife safety people!) but like all experience - a highly educational one. It has left me much more aware of the essential fragility of life, and the power of the moment to utterly change your situation.

I hope that out of this I can become more appreciative of the things we take for granted, and more sympathetic to the myriad people who are in far worse positions then myself. Watching other members of the "hand club" coming and going from the therapy sessions - many of whom, whose injuries make me ashamed to bleat about my problem, makes the minor difficulties and stresses of day-to-day fade into insignificance. You sit there and think "what if" endlessly (and you do have a lot of time in waiting rooms to spend mulling over your stupidity...) and, hopefully, out of this setback, draw some life lessons - and build something to hold you and help you cope if and when Really Bad Things do happen.

So Lesson Number One - Cherish what you have in your life - love, kids, health. Don't take it for granted.

Lesson Number Two - Don't use a knife as a screwdriver. Ever.

Thanks for reading The Dad Chronicles and apologies for the long hiatus. I'm still doing an hour of evening therapy each night, so my writing time is just not there anymore. I will endeavor to post every week of two though...I still have to set down Zachery's Wild Western Adventures...