The collarbone nightmare

Posted On November 20, 2016

I can’t actually remember which night it all started. I know I had it written in my planner for Tuesday, but I’m not sure if I actually wound up doing it then or if I moved it to Wednesday. Anyway.
As you know, we are moving house. And so, among my many other scheduled tasks, I had to go around and remove all the Command hooks from the walls. Two different A&E staff that I spoke to didn’t know what Command hooks were, so just in case you don’t either, they are these pretty great alternatives to putting nails in your walls if you’re a renter (or just don’t like nails). The removal action is pretty simple, as demonstrated:

I was doing this to a hook where our key rack had been, and got pain in my right collarbone, on the sternoclavicular end. I thought I just subluxed it, as isn’t too unusual for me, and it didn’t feel like a full dislocation. But it hurt a fair bit, and I wound up putting a heat patch on it (unfortunately my last one).

Fast-forward to Friday and the pain is honestly intolerable. It hurt even when I was sitting still, but I got a big surge of pain when I did move, intense enough to make me feel quite sick. I got periodic numbness in my right arm and hand (possibly trapped nerves?) and couldn’t do a lot of moving of the arm. I had to curl up and have little cries, as well as a lot of naps. Bear in mind that I am used to living with pain and dislocating joints on a daily basis, it takes a lot of fucking pain to make me cry.

Come Saturday it’s also pretty painful in my neck and shoulder blade (probably due to closeness to collarbone) and I have stabbing pain in the ribs below for good measure. At this point I actually consider I may have broken the damn thing.

I went to see Kadek on Saturday, and I’ll go into that in a bit, but in the afternoon we decided to go to A&E (a.k.a. Accident & Emergency, which Americans call the ER or Emergency Room, and which we now seem to have renamed to the ED or Emergency Department).

I thought that walking it would be more economical, as really we only had to cut across the Common and go down a couple of long roads, but this was actually more difficult than I thought it would be, good Christ there are some steep roads by the hospital and my chair crapped out a few times, with Kadek diligently rescuing me so that I didn’t speed down any hills à la Mr. Bean.

Also it RAINED SO MUCH. As always, I was stubborn about putting the sexy poncho® on until I was already ridiculously soaked. I never seem to learn this lesson.

There was a fair bit of a wait in A&E but to cut a long story short, I got sent for an x-ray. Said x-ray showed that my collarbone isn’t broken, although there is a weirdly big gap between one bone and another, but not at the end that actually hurts, and they can’t do anything about it anyway. Apparently, what I’ve done, is torn the muscle.

According to Google, it might look like this, a.k.a. gross.

I literally CANNOT BELIEVE I DID THIS to myself and went through all that pain because I was taking an adhesive hook off the wall I mean really what the fuck.

Apparently I can expect it to hurt for another week (which is awkward as, you know, I will literally be living in a different house this time next week), and if it’s still problematic by Thursday I can get a physiotherapy referral, which I probably will not do A) due to moving to Andover and B) because physiotherapy was more than useless to me after my original diagnosis at 14-ish.

It still motherfucking hurts and it’s grim, but knowing what the problem is at least provides some sort of reassurance. Ehlers-Danlos strikes again!

Here are some recent pictures of nature from my garden to break up this post:

I saw Kadek’s new house at the weekend and it’s really lovely! It’s got a few nice features but I like that the ceilings are flat aside from detailing around the lights, instead of having that dumb Artex stuff. Sometimes I look up at Artex ceilings and wonder why the hell we as a species started doing that shit. But yes, it’s a lovely house and I love their sofa set-up too, with all those cushions. Basically I would hire Kadek as my decorator if I owned a house to decorate.

We watched a cat documentary on Netflix called The Lion in your Living Room and it was lovely. Biscuit was confused and was trying to locate all these cats behind the TV. Also he got himself stuck behind the door like a silly.

I managed to break a hearing aid; I took them out because they were picking up the noise of something that was whirring and making it harder to concentrate, but my left earpiece stayed in my ear while the tube detached :/
The tubes need changing soon because they’ve gone all stiff and weird, and I just couldn’t get it to go back through the hole!

I have also been recently making a thing. It will become more apparent when I can find my paints after moving.

Designs for all occasions!

Probably should have washed it before I started piercing it.

Freya resting her nose in a shoe.

Wish me luck for moving, still not sure how me and the vacuum cleaner are actually getting to Andover after everything else has gone! Also I really hope I find the plug for the star lamp again!