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New icon, old bullshit.
Feb. 28th, 2025 11:43 amRemember how I said in my last update that my arm fracture was healing well? I appear to have jinxed myself, because just a few days later at yet another followup I was told my most recent xray was identical to the one from 3 weeks before it. This is bad. It should show continued healing. My GP was requesting an orthopedics consult to look at the xrays. He confided he was half-expecting to be told to just stop xraying me, but two days later he called relaying the orthopedist's instructions: cancel all my physio and upcoming direct patient care days, put the sling back on(!!!), and expect a call to book an in-person consult, soon! And then I did get that call, the same day, to book an appointment next week!
This last was particularly shocking because I'm used to thinking of orthopedics, as a specialty, in terms of the waitlists for hip and knee surgeries, which are so long they're partially culled by people dying of old age. I've since heard from colleagues that the rest of ortho is one of the swiftest and most orderly of the specialties (probably spillover benefits from all the desperate efforts to speed up the hip and knee situation), so hopefully they weren't actually putting in a special rush job because my arm is about to fall right off.
As of today I have 8 more days of anxiety and furious sling-resentment to look forward to. The sling was much easier to comply with when I was freshly-injured and in pain. Now my arm has almost no pain unless I do something excessively dramatic, but the sling causes me plenty of pain in my neck, shoulders, and back, plus not being able to approximate normal use of my hand is maddening... and yet, as soon as I put in even a few hours of wearing the sling, the very next time I got up and let my arm dangle it started to ache. So maybe I really did hustle out of the sling too quickly in the first place (with full medical approval, but how much time does a GP get to tailor their advice? Less than none).
Anyway all this seems like the perfect time to roll out my grumpy-fish icon. I don't expect the emoticon version, ~ònó~, to catch on, but I know what it means: Fish Hate Thing. Me too, fish, me too.
This last was particularly shocking because I'm used to thinking of orthopedics, as a specialty, in terms of the waitlists for hip and knee surgeries, which are so long they're partially culled by people dying of old age. I've since heard from colleagues that the rest of ortho is one of the swiftest and most orderly of the specialties (probably spillover benefits from all the desperate efforts to speed up the hip and knee situation), so hopefully they weren't actually putting in a special rush job because my arm is about to fall right off.
As of today I have 8 more days of anxiety and furious sling-resentment to look forward to. The sling was much easier to comply with when I was freshly-injured and in pain. Now my arm has almost no pain unless I do something excessively dramatic, but the sling causes me plenty of pain in my neck, shoulders, and back, plus not being able to approximate normal use of my hand is maddening... and yet, as soon as I put in even a few hours of wearing the sling, the very next time I got up and let my arm dangle it started to ache. So maybe I really did hustle out of the sling too quickly in the first place (with full medical approval, but how much time does a GP get to tailor their advice? Less than none).
Anyway all this seems like the perfect time to roll out my grumpy-fish icon. I don't expect the emoticon version, ~ònó~, to catch on, but I know what it means: Fish Hate Thing. Me too, fish, me too.
