He's a Little Broken

We’ve had another little incident here on the Hilltop. This cliché is getting well, cliché, but it’s never a dull moment around here.

Will and Bob were diligently working on their Uncle’s rock wall when a rock got away from them and landed on Will’s hand. And when I say rock, really I mean boulder as it was somewhere in the 300 pound range.

I am told that Bob managed to get his hand loose but Will was not quite fast enough. The other version of that story is that someone let go and the rock/boulder fell on someone else. I mentioned to someone, when he suggested this, that it was okay and it was just a freak accident. Someone replied, “Yeah, he’s the freak and I had the accident!” We all laughed uproariously, and a nurse popped her head into the ER room to make sure we’d not all been sharing in the happy juice they gave the patient.

We managed to get in and out of the ER in less than 4 hours which was miraculous, or a result of being at the upscale, ritzy ER near my SIL’s house and not the local Parkland extension we have down here on our end of town. I then stopped by BIL and SIL’s house to pick up Will’s stuff and leave Bob to have his turn at blunt force trauma work some more.

Will and I headed home from there and when we got home I made a few phone calls to try to locate a Orthopedic Hand Specialist in our area. I was not surprised to learn that there is such a specialization as we visited one last time Will broke a finger.

Because the Lord is merciful, the Dr.’s office said we could come in right then. Yes you read that right. RIGHT THEN. It was truly an amazing thing. We hotfooted it over to the Dr.’s office with all our ER paperwork and X-rays on CD (how cool is that?).

The Dr. took one look at his sad mangled hand and said ‘Wow, that’s bad”. Lovely. Not the kind of comment you want to hear from a Hand Specialist. Don’t they see this stuff every day? And that was before he even saw the X-rays.

Once he saw the X-rays he began to mutter things like ‘interesting’ and ‘bad’ and ‘Humm, that won’t work…maybe if we…no.’ ‘Humm.’ Yeah, it was not very comforting.

It seems that the bone in his middle finger, from the first knuckle from the tip, to the tip of the finger was broken…into 4 pieces. The growth plate was broken in two and the bone from the knuckle to the tip was split down the middle, vertically. He said normally they would but a pin down the middle of the finger to hold the growth plate together, but since his finger is also broken down the middle, they couldn’t do that. He knew he would have to surgically put the bones back together, but he was unsure how he was going to accomplish that. Surgery has been scheduled for Tuesday.

It is somewhat disconcerting to have a Dr. tell you he’s going to do surgery, but he’s not sure exactly how he’s going to do it. Oh, he also broke a bone in the tip of his index finger, but that will heal on its own, splinted as it is, next to the other broken one. He will also lose both fingernails. Oh, and he had a few stitches put in somewhere on one of those fingers. Needless to say his hand looks a little mangled and is quite useless. Yes, I know what you are all thinking now; right or left hand. Right, I am sorry to say. Guess who will be taking A LOT of dictation for Will once his English Composition class at the Community College starts.

I personally feel like it was a whole lot of bother just to get out of building Uncle’s rock/boulder wall and doing a few chores around the house.

And now for the pictures…if you’re squeamish, now would be a good time to look away.