Three-Armed Woman
Adventures in Aging
My last weekly Substack post was due on April 28, 2026. On April 27, I tripped over a stick and fell onto the asphalt road, fracturing my right wrist. An internet search tells me this is not an unusual injury in women my age. Between April 27 and now, I’ve had wrist surgery, and I’ve had cataract surgery.
The fall happened as my husband and I were beginning our daily walk, a ritual which began during COVID lockdown. My husband has continued daily walks without me, and he’s waiting for me to rejoin him.
When I voiced some trepidation about falling again, he gave me a logical response. “Now that you’ve had cataract surgery, you’ll be able to see the sticks on the ground. Next time you won’t trip.” I appreciate his encouragement and the fact that he misses my company.
In the past month, I’ve been through multiple transitions, mostly moving from one stage of recovery to another. A handful of transitions were brought on by anesthesia. I am familiar with the transitions from propofol, an opaque white liquid in an IV bag. I’ve had propofol with all of my colonoscopies. As soon as the nurse anesthetist attaches the bag to my IV, I am out within seconds, to awake in the same stretcher, but in a new room, with different people around me. It’s not disorienting.
When the anesthesiologist came to see me before my wrist surgery, he gave me the option of a brachial plexus block (nerve block) to keep my whole arm numb for two days following the surgery.
I said no at first, but the nurses talked me into it. “You’re going to have so much pain,” they said. The night I got home, I wondered if I had made the wrong decision. The preoperative pain had been bearable with minimal pain medication. Now, I had a lifeless log that hung by my side, and I had to carry it in a sling. I was an actress in a horror movie, carrying around a prop of a severed arm with lifelike fingers. But on post-op day one, I had a great day. No pain and no pain meds. I made progress on my memoir, not on writing scenes, since I couldn’t type, but on finding the structure. I felt good at the end of the day, and I felt better about the nerve block decision.
By the end of the second day, my fingers began to tingle a bit, a sign that the block was wearing off. This is where I got a refresher on neuroanatomy and physiology. Different types of nerve fibers wake up at different times. The fibers causing my brain to register tingling recovered before the fibers that told my brain where my hand was in space. As I slept, the tingling was in an arm that was stretched out to my right. When I opened my eyes to confirm visually, my arm was bent at the elbow and propped up on three pillows.
Later, I got confused again. The numb arm was heavy and kept sliding off the pillows. I thought, I should prop that thing up with my right arm. Oh, wait! That thing IS my right arm. I had gone from being in a horror movie to being in a space-alien movie, The Woman with Two Right Arms. Eventually the block wore all the way off; my nerves and brain got back into sync.
Horror movie and space-alien movie are just two in the ongoing series of Adventures in Aging. And the approval rating on the nerve block? Being pain-free was good. Lugging around an arm log was bad. But I got a Substack post out of it. So, three stars out of five.
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Thanks for reading,
Deborah
I'd give you all 5 stars, Deborah! Hope you wrist heals fully.
You're reminding me of one of my several bike accidents! With my wrist fracture, I required two surgeries--one to put in a plate and a second one to remove it. The scar looks like I tried to slit my wrist. Even at my worst moments, life hasn't been that bad. ;-P You also remind me of the block and the limp arm. The block didn't last as long for me and I remember the stupidity of waiting too long to take the analgesics. Live and learn, right.