A Woodworker Goes Into A Bar…

A woodworker walks into a brew pub, glances around,  and spots another woodworker across the room.  As the first man approaches the second, words ensue.  In a few seconds the second woodworker clenches his hand into a fist and sticks it right under the nose of the first man.

This might be Mickey Spillane’s telling of a episode a the recent Lie-Nielsen tool event in Covington KY.  Of course there is much more background to the tale.

The two woodworkers in question were Dr. MichaelCD and me.  Michael is a professor and practitioner of the healing arts, particularly as they relate to the repair and rehabilitation of injured hands and wrists.  We have been corresponding regularly since I broke my arm last year.  His counsel has been a Godsend, especially once he convinced me that I was working too aggressively on my rehab exercises and was actually retarding the progress.  Once I learned to ease up a bit the progress was much faster.

While at the LNT event he gave my wrist and hand a through going-over.  The break to my radius bone was so close to the wrist (about 1″ up from the base of the thumb, in the narrowest part of the forearm) and of such a nature that the cast had to be quite snug and restrictive with my hand at a peculiar angle to facilitate the bone knitting properly.  As such it pushed all the swelling downward into my wrist and hand, hence my struggles at rehabbing them.  As the orthopedist noted when  examining the x-ray, my lifetime of working with my hands has resulted in every joint being afflicted with arthritis and they did not take well to the incursion of the extra fluid mass being inflicted on them.  (At the same session the bone doc asked me when and how I broke my wrist.  When I replied with a quizzical look he pointed to the x-ray image.  “All this debris here and here indicates a broken wrist, and the fragments are well-worn so it was a long time ago.”  Huh, who knew?)

At the end of the day in Covington I bestowed Michael with a whisk broom and the best meal we could find close by, a time of grand fellowship.  That’s the way health care should be.  Now if only they could figure that out in Mordor on the Potomac.  In parting he gave me a new finger flexibility regimen that I have been following with much success.

Oddly enough the part of arm/wrist/hand rehab that is usually the hardest (rotating the hand relative to the elbow) went very well and fast for me, while the more simple and easy recovery (hand and finger dexterity) is something I still wrestle with.  It gets better every day as I notice something new I can do; roll the toothbrush in my hand, put in my contact lens, use a credit card reader, unscrew the gas cap in the truck, and finally today, using a spring clamp for the first time with that damaged hand.  At this rate I expect these hurdles will be distant memories by the time I hit the First Anniversary.

But for now, thanks to Michael I am well past the 90% recovery mark, and find my effectiveness in the shop at almost 100%.  To top it all off, my left arm and hand are by necessity much more facile than they were a mere six months ago, in the end yielding greater aggregate hand skill than I started with.

How much more blessing can a fellow take?