This past weekend, we had some new furniture arrive. A new mattress and box springs for the master bedroom (finally! Ours has been pretty lumpy the past six years or so), and a recliner for DH. Happy, happy!
I had hoped that DH would ask DS1 to come help him carry those things into the house, especially the mattress since it needed to go upstairs (and I remembered what an ordeal it was trying to squeeze/lug our original king sized mattress up the stairwell when we moved into this little place here). But, nope, he didn't. He insisted we could get it ourselves.
And we could. We did. It just wasn't as smooth or as easy as if there was a 20-something year old man on one end of the mattress.
After wresting the old mattress out, which was relatively easy since it went down the stairs all on it's own and all we had to do was guide it so it didn't hit anything on the way down the stairs and out the front door, and wrestling the new mattress in, which wasn't nearly so easy as it wanted to hang up going through the doorway and wedge the bottom corner under the edge of the stair tread. . . Bringing in the recliner sounded like it would be a piece of cake.
After all, it came in two parts, the bottom part and the back/top part. All we had to do was remove the box, and easily carry between the two of us one part into the house at a time.
Ha ha. Getting it out of the box was easy. Picking up the bottom (heavier) part wasn't too difficult. Navigating through the door was a little tricky, as the screen door was nearly ripped off by the wind a few years ago and no longer has that part that you can lock in position to hold the door open while you walk through it with your hands full.
I was the one to walk backwards into the house, with the chair between DH and I. And just as I was about to say "When our new couch comes (because we'd also ordered a new couch) you definitely need to have one or both of the boys come help bring it in", I had reached about the point in the front entryway where you are almost past the stairs and entering the living room. (The ends of the treads stick out into the hallway for the first half of the staircase and end about where the opposite wall of the hall/entryway stops to open into the living room.) That's when the overstuffed portion of the chair got a little hung up on the part of the stairs that sticks out and DH gave a little shove to push it through.
Except when he shoved, my wrist also got hung up on the part of the stairs that sticks out, and apparently my wrist was bent just right and DH's shove was just hard enough that the edge of the stair tread pressed just right into my wrist and I felt a POP. No pain that I was aware of, just a distinct interior pop in my wrist and my eyes immediately filled with tears and I almost dropped the chair.
We quickly got the chair the remaining six feet or so into the living room and set it down. All ready, my wrist looked like someone had inserted a marble under the skin. It was swelling quickly. Still no pain, unless I (or DH!!) touched that bump, but my wrist was definitely getting larger in circumference at a high rate of speed.
*sigh*
I went and made up an ice pack in the kitchen immediately, while checking to see if my fingers still functioned, if my wrist still bent up and down, if I could twist that hand back and forth like normal. Yes, yes, and yes. It was fine, worked fine, if you discounted the rapid swelling and the growing feeling of heat right under that marble like bump.
While I was sitting on the couch with the ice pack on my wrist, mentally running through what medical knowledge I had gained through years of raising kids and dealing with their injuries ("sprains swell immediately, breaks don't." "a hot spot can indicate a break" When DS1 broke his wrist sledding in 2000, he could still move his wrist and fingers normally, but he had pain. The swelling didn't materialize until the next day.) DH brought the other portion of his new recliner in and attached the two pieces together. Then he tested it out, declaring it a great chair (he's been wanting a recliner for a long time. We used to own a couch that both ends reclined on, but I wasn't comfortable sitting on it, and still do not find reclining furniture to suit my posture.) Then he was very quiet for a few minutes before he said:
"I feel guilty that your wrist is hurt. I don't want to ask you to cook now," (I was going to start cooking dinner once we'd gotten the new bed and chair brought in). "Do you want to go out to dinner?"
Meanwhile, I'd been thinking that if my wrist was too injured to be able to ride the California Horse, I was going to be devastated and have a really hard time not being grumpy about having gotten injured carrying in furniture.
After I'd applied ice for about 20 minutes, we did go out to dinner. Nothing spectacular, as I was hungry, and my wrist was starting to feel uncomfortable. Not pain, exactly, but a weirdness. A little heat, an almost numbness that went from my index finger, through my wrist and toward my elbow. I wanted to get dinner out of the way and then possibly go to urgent care to have my wrist looked at. We probably could have had my wrist x-rayed first, and then gone out to eat, but I knew if I had to wait in a waiting room for hours before getting seen, I was going to be really hungry and possibly have a headache from going too long without eating. So we went out to eat first.
By the time we were done eating, I decided to just go home, apply more ice, take some Motrin, and see how my wrist felt in the morning. The swelling had mostly gone down by the time we paid our tab at the restaurant.
The next morning, it was a little sore if I touched the remainder of the bump, or pushed or pulled anything with that hand. But other than that, it felt and worked like normal. So I went to the barn, rode--my wrist worked and felt perfectly fine (until I leaned on that hand when I went to dismount)-- and cleaned stalls. Before cleaning stalls, I had my wrist looked at by one of the other boarders, who happens to be a veterinary pathologist. Based on examination and my description of what had happened and what it felt like, she diagnosed it as a popped joint capsule in my wrist. The sudden swelling would have been the synovial fluid that had been released. In human medicine terms, I have a minor sprain of the wrist, to be treated with ice, rest, anti-inflammatories (Motrin) and support with an elastic bandage if I insist on using it (as in, to clean stalls or other work, which I do to a degree. Life doesn't stop for a sprained wrist).
Since I didn't relish the thought of wearing the same bandage on my arm to cook with that I wore while cleaning stalls, I brainstormed a way to keep my (one) elastic bandage clean while at the barn. I wrap it in vetrap, which is a somewhat stretchy, somewhat sticky bandaging tape for horses. It keeps the dirt and germs off my elastic bandage, and I just peel off the vetrap when I leave the barn. Works like a charm. :0)
zebra striped vetrap doesn't look like zebra stripes on my arm
And the best part of this: my wrist doesn't bother me at all when I'm riding. So my riding schedule hasn't needed to change. (If you can't tell, riding is very important to me.)
I have had to cut back on chores though, especially things like pulling weeds. And I'll need help with the canner if I do any canning in the next week or so.
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