In May, on a dry sunny afternoon, walking home from the post office on a route I have walked a thousand times, I tripped over the uneven pavement and fell and smashed my left hand against the pole holding the traffic light. X-Ray showed a classic “boxer break”, a small fracture in a metacarpal bone that had twisted a bit when I fell. A few days later I had a short routine operation at the local hospital to insert a wire so the bone could heal in place, then a few weeks later had a second, shorter procedure to remove the wire.
And I didn’t post or tweet about it in English, because it was embarrassing and banal, and I fully expected I’d be back to normal shortly with nobody outside my immediate family/friend circle (and German cat Twitter) knowing about this ridiculous thing I did.
Except at some point I developed Morbus Sudeck, a condition where the central nervous system gets blown up after a small trauma. It’s also known as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, and I can testify to the Pain part. It hurt to run water over my hand in the shower, it hurt when the physiotherapist did a lymph drainage massage, it hurt just sitting around watching TV. It hurt to sleep, it hurt to be awake. My *fingernails* hurt, and they stopped growing. In June I could barely wiggle my fingers or bend my wrist. It’s been a fascinating and frustrating process to claw back from that, and as most of the ways I had spent my lockdown days–cooking, sewing, skipping blithely through the town–were severely painful or downright impossible.
Spent the summer watching TV–LOTS of TV–and averaging about five medical appointments a week.
Today, more than six months after I tripped and fell (hereafter known as my Kriegsverleztung, or war injury) I still can’t make a fist, curl my fingers around a pan handle or broomstick, or bend the fingers on my left hand in the same way I can my right hand. I am also phobicly afraid of tripping and falling. BUT I can type with the keyboard, peel vegetables, do some limited stitching, heft a half-liter of beer, and grasp a wide handrail. My fingernails are growing again. It’s time to start doing something more than watching TV.
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