Well it looks like I am one step closer to fulfilling my dreams of being a bionic man with the addition of a large titanium screw in my right wrist. The purpose of the surgery was to fix a fractured bone in my right wrist which in the X-Rays and MRIs looked much like a broken peanut . . . minus the nuts I suppose. It is a good thing that I am not a horse because that little hand injury I wrote about a few entries ago was obviously a little more serious than I thought. Originally the doctors gave me the woefully inaccurate diagnosis of a sprained wrist. As such, I walked around for a month and did many things that one might not do with a broken wrist, such as play 18 holes of golf, several basketball games, and many other wrist damaging activities. Yeah I am not very smart sometimes.
Ultimately after LOTS of pain, I saw a doctor in Manila who finally made the correct diagnosis and informed me that I would need surgery to have a special screw inserted into hand. She then said, “Let me go home and see if I have any of the correct screws left for the surgery.” Bwah, bwah, huh? Yeah, needless to say I was a little worried. My doctors here did not exactly have any confidence in the Manila doctors either. Thus in order to avoid any mistaken amputations or waking up with a hook in place of a hand, it was decided that the best option would be to medivac me the hell out of Manila. Thus, off to Singapore for the surgery.
My able Singaporean surgeon, Looi Kok Poh, inserted the aforementioned pin in my . . . well let’s call it my peanut bone (or scaphoid for those who really want to know) . . . via a wrist arthroscopy in all of 30 minutes. This basically involved sticking a tube through my hand down into my wrist. The surgery left me with one fully functional hand and one swollen club of a hand which was initially pretty much useless. And let me tell you about the pain from both the surgery and upon seeing the cost of the procedure. The tear inducing bill totaled $10,534.63. That’s about $315.15 per minute. Yeah, that’s a little more than I make in my modest government job.
Well anyway, included are some of the pictures of my broken and new hand. The one up top is a cool 3D MRI of the broken wrist pre-surgery and the second and third below to the side and below are X-Rays post-surgery showing my new GIANORMOUS screw.
Looking at the pictures it seems weird to think that this screw is actually in my wrist. I used a very similar looking one to hang a picture on my wall a little while ago. Except this one cost $700 and it will be with me pretty much till I die. Oh . . . and for the record (because literally everyone has asked me this question) . . . No, I do not set off metal detectors at airports because of the new screw. Well at least I did not coming from Singapore. Honestly I am not really sure why this is the case, but I am very thankful for it. As much as I fly, this would not be a fun thing to explain every time I walk through a metal detector. But hopefully in 8 short weeks my wrist will be as good as new.
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