SpoilerSo to start off with, here’s the initial injury:



For the uninitiated, my wrist isn’t actually broken here: the radius and ulna both snapped just behind the knob where they connect to the carpals, and then relocated themselves on top of their missing tips. Not pictured, the 4 separate pieces of my radius knob (I’m sure there’s a name for it).

Surgery set everything back to an approximation of where it should be, although some of the fragments were apparently too small to be bolted in and are just held in place with tension. Here’s my new and improved cyborg arm:



Improved over the break, anyway. Not a patch on the original, but before I get into that, let me let you appreciate that indistinguishable mass up near the wrist:



All screws! Daaang. If you look closely, you can see the fracture lines on the radius where the bits don’t quite fit together anymore, but most of the breaks are covered by the plate and screws. Ulna lookin’ good though, I can’t even tell where it broke. A+ splinting.

The upshot of this is I am now guaranteed to get arthritis in the wrist. I’m not even being melodramatic for once, that’s a direct quote from my orthopedic surgeon. Pretty lame. I’m also going to lose vertical mobility – anywhere from 20 to 30 degrees in each direction – so it’s a good thing that’s not my waving-effetely hand.

The real bummer though is that even though the most serious injury is now as-good-as-it-can-be and put in its final cast, I still might be as much as three months away from going back to work. My elbow and knee on the right side are still broken and have limited function, even though it seems like they’re fine (until I move them wrongly) since they’re in uncastable places. Unless I can somehow get light clerical work or a chair up at customer service, there’s not much I’m fit for. Which is extremely frustrating, for a host of obvious reasons. We’ll see once the medical release is finalized and I meet with my manager.

uuugh

Spoilereven though i feel much better than i ever did in the last like, five years lately i've been feeling emotionally drained and shitty and kind of lonely-- mostly the last one. like, i have this persistent feeling that i don't really have any friends, even though i know that's probably not the case? but i don't really know anyone anymore, and i don't have any sort of social network at school past loose acquaintances

i guess part of what contributes is that all of the people i've considered best friends in the past seven years (i can think of six off the top of my head) i've gradually drifted away from and gone from talking to every day to barely ever? and it's not like we stop being friends-- most of them i still talk to-- but there's that sense of loss that i don't really know how to handle.

the worst part of this loneliness whatever is i don't know how i'd even go about fixing it. like i don't know how to deliberately make friends, and it isn't as though i have social anxiety because i can talk to people, it's not like i freeze up and panic if someone addresses me or asks me a question, but i don't know how to talk to someone on a level deeper than cursory trivial bullshit.