that's me.
i just managed to play my first gig two weeks out from the incident. hurt like hell but it doesn't harm anything. mildy theraputic. I must be the only right handed person that is glad they broke their right arm. i can't imagine being able to play with the left broken.
sorry, the rest of this post is long as it is cut and pasted from my note about the injury on facebook.
I decided to write this to answer all those “what happened” questions I keep getting. Not that I don’t want to answer each and every one with a personal touch, but if you haven’t guessed, typing hurts just a tad.
My fun elbow injury started on Friday, 6/12/2009. I got to work at about 7:45 AM on Friday. It was a nasty day. Hot and about 100% humidity with a steady drizzle of rain. There was no real work to do that day so I and another employee had a bunch of logistical tasks to complete in three hours. By 10:45 we had gotten just about everything done, but had a few things left to wrap up. By this time I was covered in sweat and dirty beyond belief. The only thing I could think of was taking a shower. I was to have no such luck.
I scampered up the side of a truck to transfer material from another truck into the tank of the truck I was climbing. Now, these trucks are made to be climbed, and I’d done it a thousand times before. I’m not sure if I took a misstep, or if I slipped on the wet surface, or if the hose I was carrying pulled back on me. What I am sure of is that one moment I was up in the air, and the next, gravity was pulling me towards terra firma. I do recall that “oh crap” moment just like Will E. Coyote where I realized that I was falling without any chance of remedying the situation. This was not a happy feeling. By the way, for those of you who wondered, this truck is about 9 feet 6 inches tall. I think my feet were at least 8 feet up, so that puts my elbow about 12 feet off the ground. I compromise and tell people that I fell from 10 feet. It’s a lot easier that way.
I landed on what can loosely be called gravel. It’s more like compressed gravel, dirt and stone dust. It’s pretty hard and doesn’t give an inch. Trust me, I know. Apparently it must have looked like I was jumping from the top ropes a la WWF to deliver a crushing blow to my opponent’s head with my elbow, only I didn’t study how to land with my body first and just tap the other guy with my elbow. Instead, I dove elbow first into the ground. Not a scratch or bruise on me anywhere else.
I pretty much shattered my Olecranon (that’s the “elbow” part of the Ulna) and drove it into the Humerus, splitting the distal end in half. Lots of fragmentation on the way. What was left of that part of my ulna came to rest in the new space between the medial and lateral epicondyles of the humerus. I also drove an unknown piece of bone through the skin at one point, but it retracted so I didn’t look like Joe Theisman. Fortunately, the long sleeved shirt I was wearing didn’t break, so I didn’t fill the wound with dirt. My wife said the CT scan looked like someone had slammed a beer stein on a marble countertop, shattering it.
My supervisor/brother in law took me up to Midstate Medical Hospital in Meriden. The office is in Hamden and I live in Middletown, so it was a bit of a crap shoot as to where to take me. He really didn’t want to take me to Yale as he thought the wait would be too long. He also didn’t want to take me to Middlesex because, even though it is near my house, he didn’t want me to have to wait to be seen for too long. His intentions were good, but it turned out to be a big mistake. Huge.
I arrived at Midstate at 11:30 AM. By this time my elbow hurt a lot, but I was able to control my reaction to it. Initially everything seemed to be going according to plan. After a brief wait I was asked the usual intake questions and sent to the ER. All the rooms were taken so I got to sit in the hall. After a short while they put me on a stretcher, but still had me in the hall in front of the intake PA’s desk. Not so long afterwards the pain started to get really intense. After some self advocating they gave me a shot of dilaudid, which helped a little bit. (Only later did I find out that all the shots they gave me were the minimum dosage they had). The pain relief didn’t last long. My wife arrived by one PM. I still hadn’t been splinted or x-rayed.
Even before my x-ray the hospital had pretty much decided that my injury was beyond their ability to treat, so they were planning to send me to Hartford hospital. This seemed to make them take the attitude that I wasn’t really their patient, so they could ignore me. I was given x-rays and a CT scan at about 1:30. Positioning for the x-ray hurt really, really bad. I was supposed to get another pain shot right before x-rays, but the x-ray tech arrived just before the shot did, so they decided to forgo the shot. (Initially, they told me that I would have to wait a half hour until another shot to see if it was really ineffective and to see how my blood pressure was doing. My blood pressure never dropped after any of my shots, and it was ineffective after 10 min. Keep in mind that I had received the first shot by 12:00 noon, 1:30 is a little more than a half hour later and I didn’t get to have that shot).
X-rays and CT scans confirmed that I had an “open right intraarticular comminuted supracondylar humerus fracture”. That means that I was hurt real bad.
Upon my return to the luxury of the emergency room hallway I was given a splint by ER staff. During this time they fought over the gauze and tape that they were using on me. Some staff felt that it should be saved for something else. Some staff told whoever was working on me to stop and help them instead with a child that refused to have their temperature taken. They had a lot of turf wars while I was there. Usually these were conducted over my stretcher while I was moaning in pain.
Getting the splint hurt a lot. I asked if I might have that second shot. They looked at me dumbfounded. “You didn’t get it? Are you sure? Does it really hurt that bad?” I think I finally got that second shot sometime around three. I don’t know. Most of the time I was hyperventilating and moaning in insane pain. In the hallway. Bleeding all over the stretcher. (Remember my open wound on the elbow from the bone poking through? By the time I left the stretcher was covered in blood, and a good amount of it had dripped onto the floor). I hear that lots of the other patients were a bit rattled that they had to watch all this and because I wasn’t getting any help.
Once the x-ray and CT results were in they were e-mailed to the head of orthopedics at Midstate. He confirmed that I had to go to Hartford, (so this was about 2 PM), and he also refused to even come and look at me. I never did see a doctor once during my 7 hours at Midstate. He did send a tech though. The orthopedic tech had a nice fight with the PA and nurse in the ER. She was upset that they hadn’t called as soon as I came in the hospital and that my arm was splinted wrong. So I got a second painful splint. They also fought over my stretcher.
The rest of my time at Midstate was spent in the aforementioned horrible pain waiting to go to Hartford. I think my wife and boss managed to get me another shot of dilaudid and one shot of morphine by constantly harassing the staff. They had to know I was in pain, I was right in front of them.
The ambulance ride was fantastic. The two paramedics from Hunter’s ambulance were great. They kept me on morphine the entire ride, one shot every 15 min, and apologized that they couldn’t give me more. They said that they normally gave higher doses for this sort of injury by that Midstate had given them orders for the lower dose. They couldn’t understand why as my blood pressure was not dropping, and I had been giver very low doses of dilaudid in the hospital. They also told me that Midstate had called them a while ago so they had been waiting an hour before they were let inside to take me. I got to leave Midstate at around 6:30 PM.
When I got to Hartford hospital I was asked the same questions over and over again by about 8 different people. They wrote it all down on scrap paper. Later when I saw my chart I saw that most of the questions I answered were marked “unknown”. The orthopedic doctors at Hartford were very upset that Midstate hadn’t washed out my wound. They mentioned that the biggest risk from an open fracture was infection and that 7 hours had been wasted. They washed it out and started me on antibiotics. They also had to do the x-rays over again. Apparently Midstate had sent over conflicting paperwork with 3 conflicting diagnoses (it takes 7 hours to do that) so they had to start from scratch.
Remember how I said Midstate had decided I was going to Hartford by about 12:00 and certainly by 2:00? Well, Hartford hospital and the orthopedic doctors had been waiting for me all day because Midstate called them and told them I was coming. The orthopedic specialist on call who did the operation (Dr. Jeffery Burns) had cancelled all of his afternoon appointments for the day and then had to play golf in his office waiting for me to arrive.
I got into surgery by 8:30 and spent 5 hours there. As the pictures demonstrate they threw in a bunch of hardware to stabilize my humerus and ulna.
The first shift post op after I woke up was rough. I think it was mostly a nurse issue. It took all shift to get me on a dilaudid pump rather than the shots they were giving me every few hours or so. This worked much better. Even so the pain was insane. The second shift nurse (Colleen) was fantastic and made me feel like a patient. She also took care of my nausea, as the constant antibiotics made me pretty prone to vomiting. She also worked first shift the following day. The third shift nurse (Jackie) was also great. She kept my narcotic pump full, took care of any antibiotic malfunctions, and kept my catheter bag drained.
Yes, catheter. I got to experience these three times. Once as a “straight cath” to drain me and remove. A second time trying to get it in and aborted, and a third time with a “Foley catheter” which gets to stay in you. Big fun. During these times and every time else my wife Jill was my salvation. I never could have gotten through all this without her. She took great care of me, cleaned me, kept me calm, and helped the nurses. Also, despite having no medical training she instinctively knew all the right things to do. I couldn’t have married a better woman.
I finally got discharged at 3:30 Sunday. They made me urinate on my own (boy those catheters can tear you up inside), and made me eat some crackers. I never did eat the hospital food. The first meal was French toast and sausages, yummy. Jill lifted the lid and said “look honey”. I gagged. All the other meals provoked the same reaction just by smell.
I’ve been recovering for almost 2 weeks. They removed the half cast they sent me home in and gave me a removable splint. Most of the time I’m supposed to have it off so I can raise my arm above my head and keep making a fist to get the swelling down. Then I have to ice it. I also have to do range of motion exercises at least ten times a day. Pretty much everything is back to normal except that I can’t bend or straighten my elbow fully. I have PT 3 times a week to help with that. It hurts a lot. I hope they give me refills on pain meds. The other thing is that my ulnar nerve was a bit damaged and had to be relocated. That makes my pinky and half of my ring finger as well as the palm and some of the forearm on that side a bit numb and more or less in pain. They say this might go away.
Anyhow, I can still play the bass. Come see the guy with the broken arm at a gig near you!
fractured elbow 
) The proximal (elbow) end of the ulnar bone had a compression fracture (big dimple in the socket) and a one inch crack (lengthwise) extending to the distal (wrist) end of the bone. A few weeks after the cast came off, I started playing bass again for therapy.
