Doctor Heal Thyself

Mary arrived in a half hour. I was agitated, pacing the room back and forth. A nurse gave me an injection to slow me down and stay on the bed. The surgeon came in. He was called from home and was still wearing a brown leather jacket. He appeared to be a world war two airplane pilot. He introduced himself to Mary and me as a hand specialist. Once he left the room, Mary remarked the staff probably makes up these specialties just to help the patients feel better, opining yesterday he had come in to help someone as a foot specialist. But she was wrong. He had proper credentials to perform the meticulous surgery which lay ahead. The surgeon returned sans the jacket checked out the x-ray and told me to leave the thumb alone. I was inhibiting any circulation left by pushing too hard trying to keep it in its normal position.

I changed into the latest style of hospital clothing. They put a catheter in my arm. As the preop sedation started to work, and I sank deeper into the bed they transferred me to a gurney and wheeled me into the surgical suite where I came together with the anesthesiologist and the hand surgeon. Another table was wheeled up. It had a surgical microscope sitting on top. The anesthesiologist added more meds to my catheter until I could no longer feel or move my arm. I was still awake as the operation began.

The first part of the process was soft tissue reconstruction. The surgeon first reattached some blood vessels because without nourishment and oxygen any further repair was doomed to fail. This was true microscopic surgery; the doc peered through a binocular microscope pointing at my thumb to carefully sew things together using sutures the size of a hair. Once the vessels were sutured the fellow stitched the soft tissue components together, he said were mainly ligaments. That made sense, ligaments are the puppet strings attaching bone to another bone, and so they move together.

I talked with the fellows during this time, yammering on about myself, and don’t recall asking many questions about my two new best friends in the world. I just kept talking and talking. After two hours into the surgery, the nurse came in to tell me Mary was going home. I told the nurse to let her know I love her (Mary). Soon afterward the fellows must have decided I was talking too much, and I lost consciousness as the anesthesiologist added more drugs to my sleeping cocktail. It was time to drive a stainless steel pin through my thumb to make the repair job stay together. This part hurts like hell, and they needed me way out.