A (Bone) Cracking Adventure

22/5/2016

So if you didn't get it from the title, yes I broke a bone. I really broke a bone as you will see below. How do you ask? What feat of danger was I up to? What extreme sport? Well I was bird watching on a boat... yes. 100% true. But slightly more extreme than just slipping ohhh yes. So the boat we were on was not really made for the open sea and we got caught in very choppy waters as we went out onto the Atlantic and the boat was leaping around all over the shop then suddenly out of no where the boat fell down the side of a wave. Yes, fell down I think I remember free falling, maybe... maybe not, but a friend of mine described it as "Like really bad turbulence but on a boat" and a Dominica friend of mine swore he though we were going to capsize and "in one breath asked God to forgive me for all my sins" so yeah not as simple as a slip and fall on a boat. So after the water receded after the fall I was on the deck trying to move my left arm, it was not moving. Then I looked down and saw the huge bulge in my arm and a limp left arm. To which I said "Ohh f**k, my arms broken" then one of the very nice but utterly dim witted crew members said "Oh is it?" I still think to this day (one month later) he though my fore arm was broken. You'll see from the X-Ray below how obvious it is it was my upper arm. The sling they then made for me was utterly woeful, but I found it hilarious at the time (I was for some reason in no pain, and I was never in any real pain the whole time) he essentially loosely wrapped a towel over my arm and tried to splint my forearm with a flip flop... bless him for trying but seriously. I just ended up supporting my arm with my other arm. So I got picked up at the dock by a van which was apparently the ambulance and bounced through town to A&E only to be told the X-Ray machine was broken so back I went through town to the private X-Ray machine and back to A&E I went where my arm was put in a proper sling, I was stripped and given morphine (bum cheek injection) and off I went to the ward to wait for my insurance to talk to me and for me to decide how I want to continue. So a few days later I met a Cuban consultant Orthopedic surgeon (Dr Julian De Armas0 who told me about a very nice German Steel plate he could fit for me. I weighed it up, spoke to the insurance company who agreed to pay and then signed my life away and on the 25th I went in for surgery and woke up a few hours later as a Cyborg. The first thing I checked was that my arm was still there then I checked my legs were both still there. Why my legs you ask? Well in the first 3 days of being in hospital I had seen 3 guys loose a leg each so I was a ittle worried they seem to love amputation in Dominica,

It was a rather painless experience in the hospital if I am honest, the night nurses were similar to the Gestapo but I got by. I had so many local visitors I didn't know what to do with them all and the manager of the Mountain Chicken Project visited me twice a day with food made by his wife so I was very well taken care of. You really know who your friends are (or not) when you are in hospital. So if any of you who visited me in hospital are reading this, thank you very much! Greatly appreciated.

I will give an update in a few weeks as to how the arm is healing.