But at the time of fracture, I did not know this. All I knew was that my left hand hurt a lot and that it was swelling badly. I was able to move each of my five fingers completely (though painfully), so I thought it was just a bad muscle or tendon stretch, and that a little ice would do the trick. I even did a few more flips (but over a much softer surface). That night, however, while typing a C# program, I realized my little bump was more serious than I originally thought it to be. My hand swelled up all night until it looked like a red, glove-shaped balloon. The skin was so tense, I was afraid it would tear up somewhere.
First thing next morning (@11AM), I went to my doctor (who is also my aunt), and obtained her medical opinion on the subject. She concluded "fracture", and told me to go get an X-ray done at the Santa Bertilda medical laboratory. I was there and back again in about an hour (Thanks Transmetro!). I returned with Q77 less and 1 more X-ray diagram, the latter showing a clearly hurt, injured, fractured, broken hand.
Since my brother is also part of the medical society, we asked him to contact us with a good traumatologist. Thanks to him, we got an appointment that very night with Dr. Gaitán at his office in the third floor of the Torre Azul building. That doctor is officially the nicest doctor I've ever met. Since he was a traumatologist, I thought he was going to take hold of my hand and forcefully twist my fingers in weird directions to get my bones together again, while I screamed and shrieked and gnawed my teeth and jerked uncontrollably in the utmost pain and desperation, flashbacks and death wishes racing through my mind. But no. He just looked at the X-ray diagram, he looked at my hand, poked it a little, and after some thought, he sadly concluded "I'm sorry son. You need an operation" and then casted my hand. He told me my bones were to be nailed together, and that I would need at least three weeks to heal. Though not the best news ever, at least I now knew what had to be done.
Two days later, on Thursday 24th, I entered the Roosevelt hospital emergency building @6AM to submit myself to my operation. I took off all of my clothes, put on a red robe, had my right hand's skin and vein pierced by a needle connected to a serum bag, waited almost 5 hours in the waiting room, and was finally submitted to the nurses and doctors for my operation in one of those hospital beds with wheels at about 10:45AM. They made me wait a little longer in another room, but after about another half hour, I was wheeled into a room like the ones you see in ER: tiled cyan walls, clean cold atmosphere, and big round lights over the room's main piece of furniture: the operating bed. I was told to take my robe off, so then I was naked except for a blanket over me. I remember one of the doctors asking "So how long is this gonna take?", to which another responded "an hour, maybe less". One of the doctors was a female, and though I only saw her eyes and upper cheeks, I'd estimate her as at least an 8 in my scale. I'm pretty sure her name was Joyce. Then one of the doctors said "this is going to hurt", and injected a liquid of some kind into my serum tube with high pressure. I really did feel pain in my hand as the pressure entered my vein. A few seconds later, the same doctor said
- "This will help you relax"
- "Is it the anesthesia?", I asked.
- "Yep"
- "OK guys, thank you all very much. Take good care of me, I trust you. See you later!"
I woke up five hours later with a new cast, two nails, and severe pain in my left hand, an annoying light pain and needle in my right, moderate pain on my chest, equally naked, lying down on a wheelbed, looking up at my mom and my sister. They asked me questions and I answered them coherently, but I can't remember any details right now; my first memories after waking up from the operation are still very hazy. I was then fed with a nice vegetable salad and a mostly stale wheat drink. Though I was told I would spend a night in the hospital, it so happened that I got out that very night, on a wheelchair.
I was dizzy and nauseous that night, but I was somewhat comforted by the visit of several relatives. I found out that the pain on my chest was due to a doctor hurting me there with his knuckles. My brother says that all patients need to be forcefully, painfully woken up from the anesthesia effect, lest they stay in their numb state, and without external help, fail to breathe and die. So I had this hurting red mark on my chest for about a week, but it has now finally healed.
But my hand hasn't. My left hand still has nails inside it, a cast around it, and light constant pain all the time. And this is what my life is about these days: waiting for my hand to heal. As I mentioned in my last blog, language classes are still part of my routine, though my gymnastics are obviously temporarily suspended. I also feel lucky that my right hand is still intact, since it still allows me to manipulate most objects, including my cherished abacus (soroban).
As a sidenote, I want to apologize, from the bottom of my heart, to the one who has suffered the most due to my recklessness: my left hand. I'm sorry, left hand. I'm very, very sorry for having broken your bones. You have always been a great hand, and I shouldn't have put you at such a risk. I promise I will do everything possible to help you heal perfectly, and I only hope you can forgive me.
It's a bit ironic that I have the most things to write precisely when one of my hands is incapacitated, but it's true (I guess my right hand will only benefit from the extra typing exercise). The story of my operation is already long enough, but during these two weeks, I've somehow come up with many more singular events to write about. Though not the most exciting, the most singular of these was probably the Campollo event.
Last monday, while I practiced my abacus exercises, I got a call from Richard. He told me his cousin's girlfriend had some kind of hard drive failure, and that she URGENTLY needed to recover some of the data inside. I told him to tell her to call me, and so he did. A few minutes later, I got a call from Miss Estela Campollo, who described her problem with full detail to me. She asked if she could come over to my house immediately so I could recover the data, and I agreed.
About 40 minutes later, a big car parked in front of the house, and two girls came out. And I thought "Wow". They were pretty pretty. Estela was tall, light-skinned, fit-looking, and had long, auburn, salon-straight hair (9 in my scale). Lucia was shorter than her sister (petit), white-skinned, slim, had a cute face, and had her black shiny hair held in a tail (9.3 in my scale).
We all went to my room and then I set off to recover the data using whatever means possible. Due to my present anatomical inconvenience, I will skip the technical details. I will only say that I used RiP (Recovery is Possible)-Linux 1.9, Testdisk, my 20GB internal hard drive, and my IDE/USB adapter to recover Estela's laptop's hard drive data and backup 18GB of it in Lucia's laptop and burn the remaining 10GB in 3 DVDs, while we sipped on water and pineapple juice. It took me four to five hours to get everything out of there, but we were talking all the time, and so time passed by us fairly quickly.
The important part, however, is this: Estela is a graphic designer for Empire Promotions, the company that organizes all the important trance concerts here in Guatemala (such as the ATB concert I went to last month :) :D :) :D :) :D :), so she obtains free tickets to the concerts for her close friends. And GUESS WHO'S ESTELA'S NEW CLOSE FRIEND???? =D. (Correct answer: Me). She also paid me Q300 for the job, but that was her call.
It also turns out that Estela is an avid trance music (or as she more technically puts it, electronical music) fan, just like me, except much more :). She knows a lot about it and has already told me some of the bits and facts about this kind of thing. So I'm looking forward to a pretty friendship based on music taste and concerts here. Isn't that just so very nice?
Of course, given my present health situation, I'm unable to fully enjoy a party or concert, so I'll still have to wait a bit to enjoy my newly-acquired privilege. After healing, however, I think I'll have a BLAST!
Hmm, I wonder if she would be upset if she read this? I'd guess yeah, especially since I scaled her lower than her sister. But 9 is still an excellent mark, don't you think?
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