Broken Scaphoid Adventures

As many of you know, I recently broke my scaphoid.  As a result of this unfortunate accident, I was forced to spend two and a half months with a cast on my left arm. This particular cast was especially intrusive because it included my thumb, holding it in a position pointing away from the palm.  Having my thumb forced into this position had a few rather annoying side effects: I could no longer fit my hand through the sleeves of any of my coats, and I was constantly tapping the spacebar accidentally.

With a broken scaphoid, you are forbidden from doing any lifting whatsoever with the injured arm.  As a result, I’ve become very skilled at doing things exclusively with my right arm.  Indeed, after a few weeks I began to take delight at the way people would go quiet and stare at me while tying my shoes or washing dishes, knowing that I was about to be treated to an outburst of “wow, you’re doing that pretty well with one arm”.  While my right arm was learning its true capacity for independence, however, its encastulated counterpart was degrading into a fragile, withered husk.

Although breaking a scaphoid is a bummer, there are some neat things that happen when your arm takes a two and a half month leave of absence to repair itself, especially when the cast is removed and the arm tries to return to duty.

Here are a few curious particularities of life with a hand fresh out of a cast:

--One of the first things I did when I arrived home from the hospital was rush to the bathroom to wash my hands.  I hadn’t given my hands a proper wash in months, and I expected that running warm water over my withered left hand would feel like a long-overdue immersion in a stream of ambrosia.  Alas, it did not.  Because my wrist and thumb had been locked in place for so long, they painfully recoiled at even the most basic scrubbing motions.  In addition, the skin had become thin enough that it was extremely sensitive to the temperature of the water; my hand was either frozen or scalded, no matter how much care I dedicated to adjusting the taps. This experience was the first, and perhaps most profound, disappointment of my recovery.

--My first post-cast shower was much better.  It was the first time in months that I would be able to shower naked, so I was very excited.  I don’t want to exaggerate the trouble with wrapping my hand in plastic to take a shower—it really wasn’t that bad—but I nevertheless began to crave the freedom to scrub and waggle each of my digits in whatever manner I chose.  The hot water and the movements still hurt, but they didn’t sear the way they had the night before, and the sheer joy of having warm water run over my naked wristflesh more than compensated for any unpleasantries. 

--Because the skin on my left arm was more sensitive to hot water, the formerly-casted regions of my arm turned red during the shower, as though the cast had left an imprint.  These portions of my arm also shrivelled up in the way your fingertips shrivel if you’ve been in the bathtub for a long time.

--The skin under the cast becomes very sensitive, and nowhere is this more evident or interesting than in the shower.  The roughness of my chest hair made it painful to rub soap over my chest.  Washing my hair felt like I was plunging my hand into a pool of suds and needles.  When the sense of touch exaggerated to the point that previously harmless strands of hair force you to pay attention to them, the geography of your own body becomes more detailed much more dangerous.

--An area under a cast gets much more hairy than usual.  You could see the imprint of the cast by a fuzzy stencil of dark black fuzz on my arm.  I did not think thumbs could get so hairy.

--Although it stands to reason, I had never realized that every time I wash my hands, I instinctively shake the water off them.  This is something you should never do when it hurts to bend your wrists.

I didn’t need to break a bone to know that my body is a remarkable device, but the trouble caused by a tiny fracture did allow me to appreciate it in new ways.  As my wrist regains strength, redevelops its familiar muscular bulges, and begins to bend like it did before, it becomes easier to forget the scalding capacity of lukewarm tap water or the sharpness of chest hair.  I’m not going to encourage people to go out and break their scaphoids, or any other bone for that matter, but I will say that the experience forces you to think differently about the way that your body fits into the world it inhabits; it’s remarkable how many properties of things can remain hidden as long as your body sticks together, supports weight, and bends the way it should.