Aaron Silvers

In about two weeks, I’m going under the knife for my finger.

It’s going to work like this.  I have an “interior anterior fracture” which basically means that the middle of my left ring finger is cracked right through the long way.  The lower knuckle it touches is really messed up.  Lots of bone fragments that have to be removed, and they can’t just piece them back together.  So they’re going to graft about 7mm of bone from lower in the finger (what we normally think of as “the hand”), just above my wrist, and reshape that chunk into what the base of the affected finger bone should look like.  Then, they’re going to cut open my finger lengthwise, pop the lower bone and the affected bone OUT (like you’d crack open a crab leg to expose the tasty crab leg meat on both ends), detach the tendons and stuff, clean out all the bone fragments and dremel out a block to replace with the bone they just grafted and shaped.  Then, they screw it into the bone, replace all the tendons and stuff, put the finger back into place, put me in a lobster claw cast covering my wrist all the way to the tops of my lower three fingers and voila.  I’m in and out in a matter of hours.

I’m told that the pain I had as a result of my knee blow out will be nothing when compared to the pain I’ll feel recovering from this surgery.

I’ll be in a cast for two weeks, then in a splint much like I am now for maybe another 16 weeks as I go through intensive rehab on my hand, 3 times a week.

So… the morale of this story is that if your airbags are about to go off in a collision, move your hands away from the steering column as soon as you can.