Sidelined By An Injury – Addicted 2 Decorating®

To say that this weekend didn’t go as planned would be a huge understatement. I had hoped to have all of the walls primed in foyer and bedroom, and to have all of the trim installed in the foyer by the end of the day yesterday. That didn’t happen because I seriously injured my right hand.

The good news is that it wasn’t an injury from my DIY projects, so my safety record there is still very good. I’ve been pretty proud of the fact that I’ve been DIYing as long as I have, and using the saws and other power tools that I’ve been using for three decades, and have had so few injuries that I could count them on one hand. And none of them have ever been major. No, this injury that sidelined me this weekend was from a fall.

On Friday, I had scheduled for the man who cleans up my construction debris to come out and clean up my carport and haul away everything I didn’t want to keep. If you’ll remember, this was the aftermath of my walk-in closet project…

And after they hauled everything away, this is what it looks like now…

I still have to get out there and sweep up all of the sawdust and try to get that oil off of the concrete, but at least all of the mess is gone and it looks so much better…and safer.

To make room in the driveway for their trailer, I had parked our van on the street in front of the house. Since I didn’t go anywhere the rest of the day on Friday, I completely forgot that the van was still parked in front of the house, so it stayed there overnight.

I was wearing Rothy’s, which have those nubby soles, and you can see where my feet left marks as they slid all the way down to the bottom step.

Had I just kept my arm up and let my hip catch the full weight of the fall, everything would have been fine. Believe me, I have enough padding there to sustain a fall with no pain. 🤣 I didn’t hurt my back or my hip or my legs. Those parts were all fine. But as I was falling, I instinctively reached out with my right hand to brace for impact. And as my right hand landed flat on the porch, it too went sliding right out from underneath me. Again, it was like I had fallen on ice. And my hand, which was flat on the porch to catch my fall, slid with the full force and weight of my freefalling upper body right into this post.

I sat there, completely stunned and in excruciating pain, for a few minutes grasping my right hand with my left hand. Honestly, I was afraid to look at it for a couple of minutes because I was sure I had broken something. Pain was shooting through my three middle fingers, the middle of my hand, and into my wrist. I thought that there was surely no way I had just rammed my flat hand into that column with that much force without something breaking.

I finally gathered the courage to look at my hand to assess the damage and see if I needed to head to the hospital. It hurt so badly, but everything was still moving. My three middle fingers, while in excruciating pain, seemed were all bending properly and on command. Everything else seemed fine with my hand and my wrist. So I decided to forgo the hospital visit and just give my hand time to heal.

By the time I got home, my fingers had swollen up like sausages. I could still move them, but because of the swelling and the pain, there was no way I could have gone on with my plans to paint and install trim. I don’t think I could have grasped a paint roller or a paint brush, and I certainly can’t do those things with my left hand. By yesterday morning, it definitely felt better, but I was still having a hard time grasping things because of my big sausage fingers. And if I grabbed anything too tightly, it was painful.

It’s still not back to normal this morning. My fingers are still swollen, but I have almost no pain today. If I grab something really tightly, the pain level is only a 1, or at most, a 2 (on a scale of 1-10). That’s tremendous improvement over how it felt on Saturday, and I’ve worked through much worse pain in the past. So I’ll be back to trying to make headway on the bedroom today.