I Learn How Important Tendons Are

The following Monday, I took one of the other counselors to the same doctor’s office since she wasn’t feeling well.  I managed to run out of gas on the way there, which was a bit embarrassing, but we did get there, and her visit there took hours, so we didn’t get back until late afternoon, just in time to setup for the evening paintball game.  As I was screwing a CO2 tank onto a marker, I heard a snap, and something felt funny.  I looked down, and the tip of my thumb looked wrong.  It was rotated ninety degrees at the knuckle, and bent strange.  It didn’t hurt at all, but I couldn’t move it correctly.  Once again: “well, that’s not good.”  I headed up to the kitchen to find the nurse.  Both she and MC-5 looked at it, suspecting that a tendon might have gotten misaligned off my knuckle.  It still didn’t hurt, and they messed with it quite a bit to try to fix it, but to no avail.  I called my Mom to have her set me up with a “real” doctor’s appointment the next day.  She called back a few minutes later and told me that they wanted to see me right away, so I headed out as everyone was going to staff worship.  An hour later I arrived at the hospital in Roseville with my Mom, and went into the emergency room.

I have never been seen so quickly in my life, which was pretty surprising, since a finger injury shouldn’t be life threatening, it should be pretty low on the priority list.  Within ten minutes I have been examined, and they had taken a number of x-rays.  This was followed by being left for over an hour in an exam room without any info.  Eventually a nurse came in and informed me that I was scheduled for surgery in Sacramento the next morning.  He would have left it at that if my mom hadn’t intercepted him and demanded more details.  It turned out that I had snapped a tendon in my thumb, and it needed to be reconnected before the remaining pieces had a chance to retract further up into my arm.

We arrived the next morning to discover that my operation was actually in the afternoon, but we met with the surgeon, and discovered that he had observed an operation on my grandfather’s hand many years before.  We came back that afternoon, and they brought me into the operating room.  I was not going to be knocked out for the procedure, but sedated in some form, similar to a dentist, with local anesthetic.  I was hooked up to monitors and IVs, and they put a tourniquet on my arm.  It took about an hour, and while I couldn’t see what they were doing, I could hear them, which led to some interesting moments.  I was never able to figure out if they were deliberately messing with me or not, but I wasn’t thinking totally clearly anyway, with the drugs they gave me.  It was impressive what they were able to do with only a half inch Z-shaped incision to work with.  They discovered the tendon had a clean cut 95% of the way through from my knife, and the last hair holding on for a week had finally snapped, luckily not during that rescue.  The surgery went well, and they put my whole forearm in a cast, to protect the incision, and immobilize the thumb.  I returned to camp two days later, but was unable to do much useful with my left hand out of action, besides referee paintball matches.