“All will be ok” he said with such confidence. “Your hand, it’s not badly damaged”.
At first I believed him, as it seemed like the best thing to do at the time. After all, what’s wrong with having just a little bit of hope when you’re lying in an African hospital, far from home, with no money, you’re in shock from all the blood loss but decide that accepting blood products would be far too risky, and you’re about to have your hand sutured up without any form of pain relief. Clearly hearts, and not hands were his area of expertise, but I certainly wasn’t about to argue his clinical judgment. His name was Dr David. In the midst of all the chaos I never actually got his surname.
When I left Africa on Sunday 27th September, two days after my incident, my right hand and left wrist were both heavily bandaged. Needless to say I couldn’t do anything for myself. Although I could use my left hand, I couldn’t carry any weight, and my right hand was, and still is completely useless. So, as you can imagine, my flight to Hawaii, via Ethiopia, Dublin and Los Angeles was just a little bit challenging. I couldn’t fill out any paperwork, couldn’t even do the seatbelt up on the aeroplane, and when I arrived in LAX it took 4 hours to clear customs because they insisted on examining every item of clothing in my bag without offering any assistance at all. The airline though was superb and I had my own air hostess to help me with everything, as well as an entire row of seats so I could at least get some sleep in between taking high doses of pain medication and attempting to eat like a 1 year old using a spoon for the first time.
Hawaii was amazing, although I’m sure at times Reuben got a little tired of having to wash my hair, cut up my food and hear about how painful my hand was. I was frustrated that I couldn’t go surfing, snorkelling or do any of the activities I really wanted to, but I was determined to not let my situation get in the way of a nice holiday. A week down the track and my hand was still extremely swollen and painful, so I thought it was probably a good idea to get it properly assessed when I arrived in Canada. Fortunately, as I was starting a placement at Vancouver General Hospital in the second week I was put in contact with an Emergency doctor, who upon assessing my hand decided I should probably get it check over by the Plastic Surgeons. At this stage I couldn’t move my thumb or index finger, the swelling was still very evident and the pain was only just being kept at bay with strong medication every 4-6 hours. The Emergency doctor made a phone call to a fellow colleague, who just happens to be one of the best hand plastic surgeons in the Canada. Not expecting anything to happen until the following week I started planning my weekend. The next day was Saturday, the same day that the All Blacks were playing France in the quarter final of the RWC. Not a game I wanted to miss. As I was heading to the pub at lunchtime to watch the game I received a phone call from the hospital asking if I could come in – so after explaining where I was heading they said come by after the game, which I did.
Over the next 5 hours I had my hand poked, prodded and eye-balled by four different doctors, all with varying looks of horror on their faces as I repeated my story to them. “A machete did this?” they all said, and before long I became the talking point of the entire emergency department. While waiting for my x-ray results to come back, they indicated to me I would need surgery as the extent to which my tendons were damaged was not something that could heal by itself. A surgical consent form was filled in and signed, and I started psyching myself up for what I was being told. Just as I was running over everything in my head, I looked over and saw the faces of all the plastic surgeons drop, and my consent form was swiftly torn up and thrown in the bin. What possibly could be wrong? As it turned out, not only did I have severed tendons to my thumb and index finger (five in total), radial nerve and muscle damage, I had been walking around with a fracture to the base of my thumb for the past 3 weeks. That fracture alone complicated things to the point where the surgeon said to me “we need to operate tomorrow, we’ll do our best to fix what we can, but until we open your hand up and have a good explore around we can’t make any promises as to your prognosis, but you need to be prepared that it might not be great”.
While it was nice to have hope at the start, the horror of this attack was starting to really take its toll. What would this mean for my medical career? Would I ever get full use of my hand back? I was gutted beyond words, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it other than pick myself up and prepare for the next phase.
The following day, two of the best hand surgeons in Canada spent two and a half hours delicately repairing my hand. I really couldn’t have asked to be in better hands (excuse the pun) and knowing they did the best possible job they could, and have given me the best possible chance of gaining most of my hand function back, is just incredible. I’m now starting a very long road to recovery, which will involve extensive hand physiotherapy for many months to come. My rehabilitation has already begun in Vancouver, and my goal is to be able to eat Christmas dinner with both a knife and a fork. I’m currently wearing a splint that completely immobilises my thumb as any movement at all could undo the repair work. My index finger has gained 3mm movement in 10 days, so I only have about 77 more mm to go. While I long for the day when I’ll be able to use both hands again, each day brings with it a little bit of progress, be it less pain or better control of my left hand for eating/writing. I’ll most definitely be ambidextrous by the end of all of this so I guess that’s an added bonus! And as for Vancouver – I can’t cycle around Stanley Park, but I did manage to hike to the top of Grouse Mountain last weekend in the snow and saw a couple of gorgeous Grizzly Bears (orphaned as cubs and being cared for by a vet and park rangers) who were about to go into hibernation for the winter. Overall, I’d say life isn’t too bad!
