Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Broken Wrist, Day 2

I struggled putting socks on this morning, and buttoning up my jeans. The cast is designed to give me no grip in my right hand, meaning none of my fingers can touch my thumb; perhaps the optimal position for recovery but it sure sucks for doing up your shoelaces. I wore slip-on shoes to work today, but still took so long showering and getting dry (don't ask) that I needed Wendy to give me a ride in the car to the shuttle.

Things started looking up a little bit when I got to the office. I went straight to the hardware depot, and picked up a Goldtouch keyboard. Since my right hand won't twist flat to type on a flat keyboard, this is ideal. I'm still about eight times slower than usual overall but at least with the Goldtouch I'm eight times slower in relative comfort.

Broken Wrist. Fancy Keyboard

But even "relative comfort" is pretty optimistic. In truth, while this beautiful fiberglass cast is a wonder of modern physical chemistry and probably less than half the weight of its plaster equivalent, it's crazily claustrophobic and intensely frustrating to wear.

Vacation, starting this Thursday, is going to be a whole new set of cast-bound adventures.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Broken Wrist, Day 1

"Broken wrist" is vague and in this case stands for scaphoid fracture. Forgive the poetic license. It's definitely messed up, though. Just look at all those bones!

Broken Wrist

It's funny really. Last time we had Sunday Streets here in the Mission it was a very chilled out affair, so much so that I set the video of it to a laid back number from 60 years ago.

This time, by contrast, the soundtrack was upbeat and involved a bunch of people converging for an afternoon of playing on the street outside our house. We had foursquare, Frisbee™, juggling, bikes, scooters, bubbles, water balloons and sidewalk chalk. Someone also brought a "caster board" (caster board is to Ripstick™ as inline skates are to Rollerblades™).

I tried it, I fell off, I broke my wrist.

Now I'm in a cast which—although cool in the sense that it's blue and made of fiberglass

Photo 13.jpg
—is uncomfortable and totally inconvenient. Day 1 and I've already discovered the amount of planning and awkwardness it involves even to take a shower.

In other news, I was tickled this week by this image: