I had my 6 week follow up with my surgeon today. I got good news, bad news, and good news.
The Good News Part 1:
I’m healing up very well. The hardware hasn’t shifted, the bones are healing, and there’s no sign of infection. So, I’m making a good internal recovery from being opened up, having a Home Depot dumped in my arm, and then stitched up like Frankenstein’s monster.
The Bad News:
I should have been doing physical therapy this entire time. The doctor asked how the PT was going and I had a puzzled look on my face when I told him I hadn’t done any. He asked if I had gotten a prescription (from him) and I said I got a prescription for the pain meds and was directed to not lift anything any heavier than a coffee cup. And that was it.
There was a moment of awkward silence as we reflected on how badly the ball had been dropped and then he said, “Well, you’re about 5 weeks behind and you’re going to have to hit the physical therapy pretty hard to get caught up. Do you have time today for a session” and I said I did. He wrote me a prescription for the PT and told me he wanted to see me in a month.
I’m cranky about that, but there’s not much to be done about it.
The Good News Part 2:
I headed down the hall to the on-site PT, got checked in, and filled out some paperwork on what I can do at that point and what hurts.
The Physical Therapist was great. She measured how much I could move, then heated up my arm and massaged it a bit, then measured it again. Just heating it up improved my range of motion by about 15 degrees – which is huge. I’ll lose some of that, but get it back with exercises. It hurts, but I’m determined.
For now, I’m headed off to a hot bath to warm up my arm – then exercises, cold, and then an early bed.
So 5 weeks behind – but I’ll catch up.