Colles' Fracture - Left Arm

[LuAnnB]

One day, when our oldest son was about 7 months old, I got really, REALLY ticked at DH.  So I said that I was going out for a while.  I drove to a park near our home, hoping nature could work its magic on me.  I pulled over to the side of the road and was going to walk down a short hill and across the lawn to a stream. 

Well, there was a staircase not 20 ft down the road from me, but did I take it?  Of course not.  I went down the hill in my flip flops.  At what must've been the last step before the bottom, my feet went out from under me.  My hands went back to stop my fall, but the angle at which my left arm hit the ground snapped both the radius and ulna bones in my arm just above my wrist.

Screaming and crying, I dragged myself back up the hill (still didn't use that dang staircase) and got into my car.  Someone came walking by and I asked where the nearest hospital was.  There was one close by and I knew it ... but let's face it, I wasn't thinking clearly at the time.  Thank goodness the car I was driving was automatic, cause my left hand was like flopped over against my wrist.

I got to the hospital parking lot and I guess I was driving a little erratically, and a security guard came up to ask what was the problem.  As I was explaining to him that I needed to get to the ER, he saw my wrist and I followed him to the other side of the parking lot.

When I went in to the ER, they didn't say ... "What are you here for,"  "Fill out these papers" or even "take a number".  They just sent me back to an exam room.

They gave me some pain med and told me to call home, because I would NOT be driving myself away from the hospital.  Well, that was swell, cause I had the only car we had at the time.  And I must have left quite a message because when DH got there, he said "If you ever have to call me from the hospital again, please start out with "I'm ok, but...""!

I started a new job at Target several days later, lugging all kinds of stuff past the scanner at the register, and probably messing up my arm for good, because I can't quite rotate it all the way even now, some 10 years later.  And we moved (with U-Haul) from Salt Lake City to Fort Worth before I got the thing cut off. 

[EiEiO]

Mar. 10, 2008 at 10:04 AM Ouch!!

[MomaNana2008]

Oct. 25, 2009 at 8:17 PM

Well, at least you got help in the hospital-out here when you break a foot they pretend there's nothing wrong and try to make you walk on it when you can't even feel it yet!  If you find a good 'Barnes" method therapy-you might get back some use of the rotation motion-the work on the myofascia and yours sounds like it was twisted and pinched-up terribly.