Picking up where I last left off… If you’re not caught up, I suggest you read this first: My Accidental Life
My daughter’s wedding was a true bash. The flowers, food, guests,music and drinks all combined to make the most perfect wedding I have ever attended. Anyone looking to repeat this miracle for their own wedding needs to get hold of Doris King, wedding planner extraordinaire of Charleston,SC.
I, of course, had been jacked up on enough morphine to be Lucy in the Sky so that I could see my daughter married. The weekend events following the wedding were a lively blur since my family is not the kind to allow a little thing like a cut finger to get in the way of the party. But after the bride and groom had been packed off to Hawaii, the empty champagne bottles rolled into the bin, and the last house guest unceremoniously booted, reality set in.
I’d lost a quarter of an inch of my finger. The pain was debilitating and even the thought of riding in a car with power windows made me shake.
Naturally, my husband was horrified at what had happened. After all, he’d only been closing a window. He changed my bandages over what was to be 12 weeks of healing. The hand surgeon recommended that my hand heal on its own for 6 weeks at which point, he would do what is called, I think, a Y flap surgery. He would cut down on the injured finger and recut the bone to make it possible to fold my skin over the bone and finally close it. My husband stood by me through the whole thing. It hurt like Hades and it looked three times worse.
In the weeks following the surgery, I wore a variety of gloves over my hand to keep it clean until my hand surgeon told me it was interfering with the healing process. Still, I wore it in public because it looked so grim. I started to find excuses not to leave the house. Every time I left the house, I would find some way of hitting it and the pain was terrible. The trouble was, that my finger was beginning to freeze into a curled position and would be rendered useless.
A few weeks after surgery, I began seeing a physical therapist to stretch and strengthen my finger. I exercised it constantly, probably more than I should, but I was determined to return to some semblance of normalcy. After four months, my daughter convinced me to ditch the pink Micky Mouse glove I’d been wearing to hide it (it was August in Charleston after all). After about 6 months, I was finally able to paint with my right hand. Being able to do the things I loved, garden, paint etc, helped me see that I was still alive and there was life still to be lived.
A year later, everything seems to have gone back to normal. My finger still hurts at times, but the injury isn’t as noticeable as I may have thought at first. It has certainly made me more cautious as a person.