Health and well-being: December 2007 Archives

Friday I ended my 12-year run at a large academic medical center in New York City. I started out as a nurse in the ER after moving into the city to live with Jeff and continued through the hospital as a nurse in the cath lab then a research coordinator and then slowly falling into more managerial and administrative jobs. I finished with three years of a directorship under my belt, an MBA, and some great experiences. The thought of leaving made me sick to my stomach...the idea of a sense of belonging, of knowing my environment, of the safety of where I was and what I knew.

But I need more and I need to see what is on the other side of the grassy hill. In my quest for being better this year, I've tried to embrace risk both personally and professionally and so I decided it was time to seek other adventures.

I'm taking two weeks off then jumping head-first into a corporate consulting gig that will have me whirling around the US most of the time. Something so completely different and foreign to anything I've know before but I'm not only thrilled and excited but strangely less anxious and panicked. I take this as a good sign that I'm on the right path.

They cut the cast off today and while there were no maggots, there was a lot of grossness that a good couple days of exfoliating needs to work over. I'm also, for lack of a better term, limp-wristed as I'm simultaneously without any strength in my wrist as well as having frozen tendons from the non-use. I can mince around but I can't let my wrist dangle ever so elegantly before me. It's imposed butchness, I suspect.

What I just realized is that on my wrist now I have my very own lightening bolt scar, ala Harry Potter. Just not on my forehead (which is where my inverted 'V' resides denoting not so much a Muggle but neither a wizarding wizard of wizards.

The physical therapist cautioned me against using my right hand for any kind of activity when I left him this afternoon. "Any kind of activity," I inquired. "Any kind," he said with a knowing look. Sigh..Looks like Jeff isn't off the hook yet, if you get what I'm sayin'.

The fading black cast I've been wearing on my right arm for the last three weeks is finally coming off today. I can admit as a health care professional that I VASTLY underestimated the impact this little surgery to repair some damaged cartilage in my hand would have on me and my day to day life. It was a much more painful recovery then I expected and the having a cast on for four weeks inhibiting simple things like typing, taking a shower, and other more intimate personal time really just annoyed the hell out of me.

Not one to let an opportunity for self-inflicted drama to go by, the impending removal of my cast unburied some old ER nursing days for me way back in the day when I was working at the city hospital in St. Louis. We had a homeless man come in who was wearing about seven pairs of thick cotton socks which probably had not been removed for months if not a year. They'd hardened into a close proximity of a plaster cast which forced us into using the cast saw to cut them off. The whole time the guy kept repeating "don't take 'em off, don't take 'em off" which is what I'd now term a red-flag and worth listening to.

With the sock cut, we literally cracked it open to reveal a foot that had been halfway eaten away by a writhing, slimy ball of maggots. From what we could piece together, the guy must have gotten some kind of wound and had flys on land and lay eggs on it. As bad as it sounds, he's actually pretty lucky because the maggots did exactly what they were suppose to do which eat rotting meat so instead of him developing a deadly case of sepsis and gangrene, the maggots kept his wound cleaned and cleared of debris. There is even a controlled therapeutic intervention for similar problems used in hospitals using maggots.

This is not to say that several of us didn't have to leave the room to puke on the ER floor. I'm just saying nature takes care of itself in strange and unusual ways. Of course he did loose his foot, tool, so that wasn't really great.

So when my cast comes off, I'm hoping I don't have any maggots in there. That is all I'm saying.