"Hand"ling Things One-Pawed

The top 15 things that I learned after hand surgery . . .

1. Flossing teeth is easier with two hands. I’m not a fan of those little plastic pick things with a small piece of string. 

2. Putting toothpaste on a toothbrush with a barrel shaped handle takes two hands. That is unless you want to see how many tubes of toothpaste you use up before you actually get a small strip of gel on the brush before it rolls over.

3. Kids said that they wanted to see stitches. That is until they were actually shown the thirty “X”s holding my hand together. ICK!!

4. Soap operas are much more enjoyable to watch when you are on Percocets.

5. Fitting a heavily bandaged hand (that resembled a caveman’s club) through a slim shirtsleeve is like fitting a square peg in a round hole – don’t try it, it just doesn’t work.

6. A better name for physical therapy (PT) is physical torture.

7. Remember those armpit noises you made as a kid? Well, armpits are very useful to squeeze Costco sized bottles of shampoo. Put the bottle under your armpit and squeeze the shampoo into the good hand. This also works for bottles of body wash too.

8. Walking the dog with my left hand was okay. Holding the leash in my left hand while trying to also pick up poop with my left hand, not so much.

9. Recovery from surgery hurts. Don’t tell me, “at least it was nothing serious.” No, I didn’t have a quadruple by-pass but you have your hand filleted open like a piece of perch and then tell me it was nothing. You’re lucky that I didn’t swing at you with the club hand.

10. Writing with the non-dominant hand is not easy. I make no apologies for my handwriting; I know that my otherwise neat handwriting was a mess. By the way, the check that I wrote you was for two hundred, not two thousand dollars. My handwriting was bad, but not THAT bad!

11. Being knocked out under general anesthesia is a great cure for insomnia.

12. People will still try to shake your hand. What?  Don’t they see that you cannot shake hands. How about I just clobber them with my club hand. Heck, I won’t feel it through the bandages.

13. Daisy thought the bandages were a giant chew toy on my hand. It became a game, pulling the hand away so she didn’t chew on the bandaged hand.

14. While a child can open childproof medicine bottles, adults with one hand cannot.

15. Chocolate is a good painkiller. Okay, it's not that it really kills the pain, but I love chocolate and it distracts me from the pain.

Thanks to all who chauffeured me around, cooked meals so Silverback Gorilla and Monkey didn’t have to live on fast food, and just called to check up on me.  I have great friends and I can always count on them. (I guess that makes 16 things learned)

Oh, there is one more thing that I learned (#17). Hugging a stuffed animal and crying due to pain is okay. Especially when the stuffed animal comes from the animal collection of a nine year old Monkey who just wanted Mommy to get better.