Wednesday, June 29, 2005

The pin is out.

It was week six and time to remove the pin.

As I am a standing (or maybe I should say laying down) member of the Vasovagal Club. In other words I tend to faint, not by choice, when it comes to some medical procedures, even just discussing the details can bring about some of the symptoms.

As a result of my reactions to simply talking about the procedure when getting my stitches out, my wife decided it might be good to have someting to relax me a bit. The Doctor agreed. Thus he prescribed a few Diazepam (generic Valium).



In the splint before starting the procedure.


Last time I was in the Resident asked how I did with the IV for my surgery. Once I said fine then she said I would have no problem with this. I was at physical therapy for my back last week and a lady there said she had a pin removed from her foot and it did not hurt at all.

The doctor took pushed on the end of the finger a bit where the pin sticks out and so did the resident. The doctor took the forceps and worked on getting ahold of the pin. He tried a couple of times with no luck. He asked the resident if she could feel it and she said that she did, so she tried. As she put more and more pressure on it to try to get a grip of it, I finally came up off of the table. That is when the doctor said they were going to have to numb it up and make an incision to get to it. Below is the needle with numbing medicine.


Here you see the snake bite left by the needle. It did numb up the finger and the top part of my palm as well.


The resident worked on getting it out. It took some several pulls and some twisting to finally get it out.






Below you see what has been in my finger for the past six weeks. You may be wondering how that helps keep one from bending you finger. Well the splint itself helps, but I guess shoving a thick piece of metal (surgical steel???) in through the bone in your finger gives you know choice, but to keep it straight. If they could have gotten ahold of it to begin with and pulled I might have made survived it, but you won't find me running around telling anyone that it doesn't hurt. I was going to keep it, but it was thrown into the biohazrd disposal container before I knoew it. Oh well, I got the picture.


Forceps.


Now two more weeks in the splint, followed by two weeks of only wearing it and night and my finger will be free. If it does start drooping I am suppose to call the doc.

4 comments:

Pseudo-intellectual lunatic said...

nice blog. reminds me of my circumcision.

Joe Litton said...

Hey, Very cool! I see no point in having injuries, surgeries, etc., if one cannot at least share some great pics along the way. When my wife had laproscopic surgery a few years ago to remove her gall bladder, we wanted to keep the removed little guy in a jar on the mantle. Thought it'd make a great conversation starter :) But the doc said no, they'd need to send it off for testing. But he did take us some awesome pics using the laproscope (I think that's the term), so we can see some of her innards like the liver and such. Very good fun.

Bonj said...

(To: Pseudo-intellectual lunatic): Thanks, I think. I hope that you are specifically referring to the posts about the surgery and not saying that the blog itself inflicts excruciating pain. :-)

Bonj said...

(To little Joe): Sounds like that could be a great start to a coffee table book. Maybe not one you would want to find at the doctor's office though.