Black Cast?!?

Went in for the MRI last Friday. I can now understand why people put up such a fuss about it. It sucks. It truly does. And, this was only for my hand. I can only imagine what a pain it is if you're doing a body or head scan.

For basically 2 hours I couldn't move my hand AT ALL. Nothing. Midway through the procedure I got an itch on the hand! I couldn't do a thing about it! Then sitting still for 2 hours...that was difficult. Talk about mind over matter!

The machine basically makes this loud, constant pulsing noise. The room is freezing, although they give you a blanket and pillows to make you as comfortable as possible. But then they stream in classical music that is played either to relax you or to drown out the noise of the machine, but it was really just more annoying than anything else.

Today I went in for the results and basically came out of there with this cast. Turns out I tore the ligament, but the doctor says he thinks it's a small enough tear that I won't have to have surgery. So, I'm in this cast for two weeks. Hopefully it will heal ok. If not, then maybe another cast for another two weeks or surgery.

Hmmm...not sure what to think about the black color of the cast. I didn't have a choice about it. I think I annoyed the guy who put on the cast because I asked him if his full-time job was putting casts on people all day long. It's a sports specialist I go to, so I guess it was a dumb question, I don't know. He just made some comment about how he'd been in sports medicine for a long time, and how I made his job sound so glamourous. Yes, there was a lot of sarcasm in his remark. LOL. So yes, that's what he does all day long. :-P

And, I guess it's much more difficult casting small-framed people, since the casting material comes in one size, which is a rather large roll of fiber-glass material. He spent a lot of time trimming the material to fit my hand. Interesting, huh? Who knew how complicated casting could be.

I also asked him if there was an art form to casting. You know, like in computer programming. You can code a program in an "elegant" way, or you can just do a "hack job" to get the program to run. I wondered that about casting too. LOL. I guess there is a skill to it. Who knew! Quite fascinating, actually!

Anyway, showering tomorrow will be tricky. This cast is actually less cumbersome than the removeable one but it is, indeed, not removeable at all! *sigh*

Send healing thoughts my way.

Cheers,
RM