9th May 2002 - Update

On the Monday following the race weekend I started phoning round to find an Orthopaedic Consultant who was a) a wrist specialist and b) had an appointment in the next week rather than in six months time as seems to be the norm. I managed to track one down at my local hospital and was glad, yet again, that I had private health insurance so I could be seen quickly. An appointment was arranged for last thing on Wednesday afternoon so there was nothing to do but wait.

The appointment duly arrived and after inspecting the x-rays taken at Northampton Hospital the consultant immediately booked me in for an operation first thing on the Thursday morning. It seems that the scaphoid joint, i.e. where the larger of the two bones in my arm meets the scaphoid, had splintered rather effectively. The x-ray on the right shows the damage quite clearly - All the dark lines that you can see are actually breaks and the reason the bone looks so wide at that point is that one piece of bone and moved out of position. The consultant said that she would try to pin it as that was much less invasive but given the severity of the break she was more likely to have to put a plate in it. Adding a plate entails a 20 cm incision running from the lower part of the palm down the underside of the forearm - Eeek! Not something I was really looking forward to but there was no way the wrist would ever work properly again without it.

I wouldn't want to bore anyone with the details of the hospital visit or the difficulties of the following couple of weeks. Needless to say the reason this report is so late is it is only now, over a month since the accident, I can even think about typing again. The next visit with the consultant was two weeks after the operation where they removed the plaster and took the stitches out. I was then allowed home with a simple wrist brace and a compression bandage to try to reduce the swelling. I then went to see Brian 'Bone Welder' Simpson who has something of a reputation for helping to get bike racers back on to the track quicker than most people though possible. He uses a combination of magnetic pulses and laser treatment to speed up the healing so I visited him a few times to get things moving.

The consultant was very pleased with the results when I saw her a couple of weeks later and said that I could now do without the compression bandage but still had to use the wrist brace if I was doing anything with that arm. A few more x-rays concluded that everything was okay and that I had actually fractured the scaphoid in my left wrist in the accident but it appeared to be healing up quite well. Just as well really as I doubt I could have survived on my own with two broken wrists! The x-ray on the left shows the rather large amount of metal in my wrist although I'm not totally convinced some of those screws should stick all the way through the bone quite like that. Then again, what do I know - I only fall off bikes regularly ;-)

Having already missed racing at Snetterton it looks like I won't be able to make the Mallory Park or Oulton rounds at the start of June nor the Brands Hatch rounds I was entered for the following week. I will, however, do everything I can to be back for the second Snetterton meeting towards the end of next month.