"I'd give my right arm..."
I don't know if I've ever used that expression before. However, I'm certain I'll never use it now.
I had a little incident last weekend. I was running on to the soccer field to sub in at my weekly Sunday night game (I'm a member of The Women's Soccer Club) when the goalie of the opposing team was whipping the ball down the field--HARD! Except it didn't get very far because the full force of this ball hit my right wrist instead.
Luckily, my friend Beth, on our team, is a doctor. She wrapped my wrist up with some ice and told me she would contact a colleague of hers to see if he could see me in the morning. Funny thing is (or actually not so funny) is that right before the game we were discussing the fact that I had just had x-rays taken of this wrist three days earlier. It's been giving me some trouble since early December and I was told I had a ganglion cyst. However it turned out that I had an old fracture, unbeknownst to me.
I asked Beth what they would do to treat it and she told me nothing, since it had already healed on it's own. She said: "unless you were to break it again, they aren't going to do anything."
About five minutes later--it was broken. Really freaky weird, don't you think? Of course I didn't know that until about 1:30 the next afternoon when I got a cast put on it. The bad news is I broke the other side of my wrist so the part that was already giving me trouble will not be fixed by the cast.
When something bad happens to me, I try to find some meaning in what has happened and see what I can take away from the experience. I'm pretty sure between what happened to my dad, earlier this year, and now this is that I need to stop taking good health for granted. Something I have always been fortunate enough to do.
As I've been learning what is impossible to do without my right hand (cutting up a cantaloupe, putting my hair in a pony tail and wiping my...never mind, we're not going to go there) I am vowing that I am never going to take my health for granted again, nor the health of my loved ones for granted.
In the meantime, the experts say you can create new pathways in your brain from doing things differently than how you normally do them: brushing your teeth with your left hand instead of your right, etc. So, maybe all of this will make me a little smarter and keep Alzheimer's at bay for a little longer? I hope so. If nothing else, the kids are being helpful with way less prodding; I'll take that for sure!
