Well, it’s been seven weeks since I fractured my left arm tripping up a curb. I’ve been through surgery, where I received a titanium head to replace the head of the radius that was twisted 180 degrees. My implant and rod are in good position and I’ve started physical therapy. But what surprises me most is the amount of pain I’m in. It floors me.
I have chronic pain, from lupus and fibromyalgia, so pain is not new to me. On a scale of one to ten, I live around a level four on any given day. But the pain of this fracture has been well over ten. I’ve had to call my orthopedic surgeon to increase my pain medications twice, and thankfully, he understands the pain concept as well as the fact that I have underlying pain, so he has been very generous with pain meds. The pain was so bad in my elbow that it seemed like the rest of my body was not in pain, a concept I’ve heard about from friends on Facebook. But as my elbow heals, I can feel the joint pain of lupus creeping in. It was so bad that I called my rheumatologist and asked if I could taper my steroids by alternating days. I’ve been on prednisone for sixteen years and am now taking 15mg/12.5mg on alternating days. For the first time since being diagnosed with lupus, I had to admit that the pain beat me. After a few days of alternating the prednisone, I felt amazingly better. I still can’t do all the things I was able to do before my accident, like using my left arm for anything other than typing, but it’s getting better.
I’m a Christian, and I strongly believe that God gives us challenges in life for a reason. And this has been my challenge. I’m just a bit frustrated because I was supposed to start school for a B.A. in Christian Studies in the beginning of May, but I’ve had to push back my start date until the end of June. I was all ready for starting this new venture in my life, but for some reason, God put it on hold. I’d like to think that I broke my arm in Virginia, on the way to Florida, because there was something worse that would happen in Florida. I’m indebted to God for that, if that was the reason. But we often don’t know the reason things happen. Sometimes we learn about them years later, and sometimes not in our lifetime. It’s one of those questions I’ll have for God when I die and go meet my maker. But I do know that five or ten years from now, this will be a blip on the screen of my life. It’s how you handle things, how much grace you have at your lowest moments that I think count for something. I always said, when I was a nurse, that there is no excuse for rudeness or misplaced anger, not even if every bone in your body is broken. I kept that rule during my Emergency Room visit in Virginia and my surgery here in New Jersey. I want to be a role model for my son, so if he finds himself in the same situation some day, he’ll deal with it with grace.
The irony of the whole thing is I’m still smoking, and it’s become part of my physical therapy. I only smoke with my left hand, which makes me lift my arm up to my lips, which is the hardest part of my injury. I think that’s why I’m ahead of the game, according to my surgeon. He doesn’t know of my secret PT trick, but it seems to work. I’m not recommending this to anyone else, but it does cut down on the number of cigarettes I smoke and I get extra physical therapy at the same time. Brilliant, don’t you think? Maybe I should go into physical therapy instead of becoming a chaplain. These little tips can really make a difference in your day. It’s because I have all this extra time on my hands that I can come up with these ideas. I need to start getting better faster, before I come up with something more dangerous than that.
