In my last post, I mentioned having been off work for a few weeks. Indeed, I’m at the end of week six of seven-and possibly more, but I hope not! I have been signed off for several weeks now-this is the longest I’ve ever been away from work/study other than that summer after GCSEs. Even when I was on the dole I had less time out of work than this!
Two years ago, I injured my left shoulder-not entirely sure what I did, but it was something like opening a drawer and twisting it funny. Lots of physio, pain medication and tests followed. An MRI a few months ago revealed that something was wrong, but it wasn’t entirely clear what. It was then decided that I needed to have keyhole surgery to see inside the shoulder and ascertain what the problem was, and to fix it if possible. I asked for this surgery to take place once teaching had finished in order to have as little impact on my work as possible, and so it was set for the first week of June. The surgery involved smoothing out my muscles, which had torn and doing some sort of filing down of my bone to stop it rubbing against the muscle! I was in a lot of pain afterwards, but the physio exercises I was given were really helpful and after a fortnight off work, I was ready to go back – albeit with a reduced capacity and a need for workplace adjustments.
However, the day before I was due to go back to work, I tripped and fell over a crate that had been left in the aisle of the supermarket. I won’t say which here, because as you can imagine, there is a “process” going on! It turned out that not only had I bruised my knees pretty badly, I had actually fractured a bone in my right elbow. It was pretty unbelievable that both arms would be injured and I had several days that were incredibly tricky where I needed to rely strongly on friends to help me around the house. Nearly 4 weeks later, and I can move the elbow a bit more, but it is still far from healed. My shoulder has made a lot of progress in its mobility because of my left arm having to be the dominant one, but it is still quite painful.
I am not actually able to type-I’m using Dragon Nuance NaturallySpeaking software– which is so much better than I expected, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see the odd weird typo here and there, despite my efforts to edit after dictation! The main problem I’m having with my right arm is that whenever I move the radial bone, this aggravates the fractured part of the elbow, and although I do need to move my arm in order to enable healing, it’s a fine line between recuperation and just giving myself a whole new world of pain! This means that I am OK to do some things, but weird little things are still really difficult-for example, one thing that I wouldn’t be able to do at work is going in an out of our kitchen, because that requires using both hands at the same time and turning both wrists, something that would just be too difficult for me to do at the moment. It’s these little things that have been the most difficult, things that I didn’t expect!
Anyway, fingers crossed I will be able to go back to work later this month, even if it is only on an adjusted basis for a while (fortunately this is the time of year when there’s a lot of annual leave, so the workload tends to be a little less intense/urgent). I am totally bored! So, I’m looking forward to getting back into blogging-if nothing else, it will give me some level of justification for the amount of time I’ve spent watching Netflix, Amazon and NowTV and poring over beauty and nail blogs whilst buying things that I really don’t need, like a drawer full of lipsticks that is twice the size it was before I was injured!
Radical Departures 