Look Ma... No Cast!!

I went in this morning to the hand clinic anticipating the removal of my cast. I was so excited about it I couldn't sleep last night. Rachelle came into the computer room at 1:30AM and told me to get to bed. I was trying to get my windows ssh client to connect to my Linux server via a trusted certificate instead of a password. Why is that so geezly hard?!?

Anyway... Here is the X-ray showing how the pins all work. Apparently in the surgery the man drills 4 skinny holes through the bone and then inserts the pins which are just pressed in.

When it comes time to remove them, he grabs them with a surgical clamp, and pulls them out exactly like you would pull out an old nail if all you had was a pair of pliers. I can't say that the pain was really bad, but I wouldn't want to have had many more pulled out than what he did.

The most alarming bit of the whole process was the cast removal. The nurse inserts a kevlar strip under the cast as a guard, then fires up the biggest dremel tool I've ever seen. I kept thinking, "Oh man.. If this thing cuts through the guard, it's gonna be grim!". It all went beautifully and despite my heightened state of fear at the spinning saw blade millimeters from my artery, there was no damage.

The doctor says no heavy lifting. No mountain biking. He was somewhat tentative about road riding. My wrist is so weak, I can't even lift a full coffee cup. I suspect it won't take very long before that strengthens up to the point where I can go back to double fisting pints of beer. I'm not sure that I'll be able to hold myself up on the road bike's brake hoods for at least a week.


No big deal. It's off. I can wash my hand, do the dishes, work on my bikes, wear a glove, and type without constantly hitting the caps lock and alt keys. Life is good.