Radial Head Fracture: The Home Game

I learned the other day that the home game for Definition, the TV game show that ran in Canada in the 1970s and 80s, used the same game pieces as the Milton Bradley home game for Wheel of Fortune.

The idiomatic power of the “home game” sits in such a small demographic niche— those of us born in the 1960s, who spent our formative years watching TV game shows with our aunts— that it’s a turn of phrase I should stop using. But I won’t.

So, for those of you playing Radial Head Fracture: The Home Game,  you’ll be excited to learn that yesterday, at my third physiotherapy appointment, I found that my elbow extension has increased from -42° on the first appointment, to -35° on the second appointment, to this week’s -20°.

That’s not 0°—the perhaps-unattainable dream—but it’s progress.

To risk introducing another perhaps-obscure idiom, it feels like I’m now in the deepest depths of the uncanny valley of right arm function: my arm looks like a regular everyday arm, and it can do many of the things that regular everyday arms do. There are, however, cracks and edges and exceptions, the existence of which is eerie.

I can drive a car, turn a door handle, put on a shirt, carry my laptop, drink coffee, shake hands with a friend, and hold a hamburger. But I cannot use nail clippers, nor press in that button on the kitchen faucet to switch to “spray” mode, nor open a stuck jar lid.

This too shall pass: the next phase of my rehab, started tentatively this week, is “progressive strength building.” I’m starting with wrist strength, the building of which should help with all of the above limitations.

Meanwhile, in list of movements for my gym workout this past Tuesday I spotted:

Glute Dominent Step Ups 3x8-10/8-10

That meant working with a box for the first time in the two months since I fell off a box (which is how we got here in the first place). 

The daunt was lower: I was set up with a lower, softer box than the killer attack box of yore, and “step ups” are a much gentler exercise than “box jumps.”  I did okay, experienced no discernible triggers, and so I feel like I’ve levelled up in the mental game of the recovery-in-the-gym.

Lisa’s coach Matt, who has some experience with fractures, messaged me last week that “studies show a surprising amount of carry over when doing all-unilateral work while injured.” Which is to say: even if I’m just working out one side of my upper body in the gym, the other side benefits somewhat too. I was chuffed to learn that.

The most helpful effect of going back to the gym has not, in fact, been in the physical part of it, it’s the feeling of capability that comes from realizing that my body still, fundamentally, works really well. Being reminded of that twice a week, at some intensity, has been a great boon to my mood.

The next checkpoints in my recovery will come in another two weeks, for my next physiotherapy appointment, and, the week after that, a follow up with my orthopædic surgeon. I’m hoping that, by that point, I will have hiked a fair distance out of the uncanny valley.