Saturday, 15 March 2003

XRay

Above as promised my xrays. On the left me, happy. The middle shows me from the inside being in a lot of pain (fortunately they gave me some morphine shortly after this was taken). As you can see, my arm broke right where the wrist guard ended. On the right me, fixed. I was still totally passed out from the surgery when they took this. I don't remember it at all. So now I have this nice metal plate and six screws in my arm. I wonder how many metal detectors I'll set off with this...

On Thursday I went to see a doctor here. Doctor Louie was a very nice guy and we chatted about skiing and snowboarding. He cut all the bandages and stuff from my arm and I saw it unwrapped for the first time after surgery. It actually didn't look all that bad. I had expected it to be all green and blue but surprisingly it wasn't. The length of my arm along the radius shines in a nice yellow hue that speaks of a big ass bruise deep in my arm though. It does hurt quite a bit to touch that part of my arm.

Anyway, the cut on my arm is about 10cm long. Doctor Louie removed the little metal clamps that closed the wound. While he was doing that I started feeling dizzy and began to see black dots. So I lay down for the rest of the procedure. I was very surprised that my body was threating to pass out now and hadn't done so at all when the accident had happened. Strange. They sat me in a wheelchair and Michi wheeled me to radiology to have some good xrays on real film (instead of the digital ones I had) done. While I was waiting there I started to feel better and could then walk back to Dr Louie's office. It's amazing how fast they have those xrays developed. It took them 2 minutes for the original and the xray copies to be done.

The new film xrays are really cool. You can see exactly where the bones are broken. It's fascinating. The really good news is that because the metal plate holds the radius together and the shattered pieces of bone near my wrist are quite well supported by the sinews in that area I don't need a cast. Instead I just have to wear a wrist support similar to the wrist guard I was wearing at the time of the accident, only longer and better in terms of support. I'm a little dissappointed about not getting a cast because there's nothing my friends can doodle on now. But in the end the wrist support offers me much more freedom of movement and I'm already starting to take my arm out of the sling from time to time. So that is very good.

In other news, we saw Adaptation, a movie by director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (the people who did "Being John Malkovic") yesterday. It's a very interesting movie that I won't talk about here for fear of accidentally giving away spoilers...

Oh and on Wednesday we saw "Bang the Machine" at the Asian American film festival here. It's a documentation about guys playing in Street Fighter tournaments and eventually going to Japan to battle the Japanese team. I liked the film. The only thing that pissed me off were some people in the audience who were obviously no gamers and made fun of the people in the film as if they were superior beings or something.

Yesterday there was a poll on SFGate about how to deal with war-related anxiety. Over 50% answered that turning off the TV would be the best way to do it. 17% were for emigrating to Canada. Tehehe. I like San Franciscoans :)

Yesterday night it rained cats and dogs and today the sun is shining again. I love ethat. In Berlin if it rains one day it'll rain the next 5 days...

  Posted by Edda at 21:16 CET