"Hand Doctor Redux and Ah Hates Winders" by Troy H. Cheek on Feb 04, 2005

Good and bad news today. I think this is God trying to level out my life. Every moment of happiness is purchased with a moment of pain.

First, the good news. Like most of my medical updates, even though it's good news it's still a bit gross so you might want to skip ahead to the bad news.

Yesterday, I went to see my hand doctor again. I had my palm stitches removed about two weeks ago. The wound was not supposed to bleed, but might seep a little. By the next morning, it had "seeped" so much that the bandage was soaked and the skin under it looked like I'd just spent too much time in the pool. The outermost layer of skin which the stitches had been holding together had gapped open. It looked like the worst burst-open blister I'd ever had on my foot, way back during a summer when I'd spent a week at a hotel with a pool and had run around on the concrete without any shoes for 4 days. On the 5th day, I stayed in the hotel room with a tiny pair of scissors trying to clip away all the separated skin so it would stop pulling and twisting and generally causing me agony every time I took a step.

My hand looked like that, but luckily didn't hurt because I wasn't putting any weight on it. Had it been a foot blister, I'd have clipped it. Since it was my hand and since my instructions were to change the bandage and otherwise leave it alone to heal, I did that. After a few days the puffiness went away and the skin laid back down. After a week or so the extra skin dried up and peeled off. Now my palm is full of irritated and red but mostly unbroken skin.

During the same period of time, the tape holding my elbow incision started falling off, taking a lot of the dried blood with it. The result was also a lot of irritated and red but mostly unbroken skin. The dissolving stitches had apparently dissoved, except for a knot and some loose bits hanging out at one end. Remembering my doctor's warning, i.e. not to pull on the loose ends just to see if they'll come out, I didn't tug at these. I just clipped some of the dangling bits which were bothering me.

For the last two weeks, I've been running my elbow, wrist, and fingers through a set of range of motion exercises several times a day. These hurt like Hell(tm) at first but gradually died down to minor twinges most of the time and only really hurt at the extremes of the range. Then one morning I woke up and found that the last of the swelling in the arm had gone down. On that day, I realized that my range of motion exercises no longer hurt. At all. It was apparently not the moving of the joints that was hurting me; it was moving them against the swelling which was trying to hold them still.

This causes me to wonder if maybe, just maybe, was it possible that I could have skipped torturing myself several times a day and had the same result had I started the exercises after the swelling went down? Did, in fact, the exercises cause the swelling to hang around longer than it would otherwise have? Is it within the realm of possibility that I actually delayed recovery by exercising joints which so clearly were not happy with being exercised?

Probably not. It is much more likely that the only reason my joints moved so easily once the swelling went away was because I had forced them to operate even when they didn't want to. At least, that's what I choose to believe.

Anyway, I went to the hand doctor and he poked and prodded. I demonstrated my range of motion and the strength in my hand. He was quite impressed with my recovery. He noticed the stitches peeking out a bit. He grabbed them with some forceps and started pulling on them. When they didn't just jerk loose, he pulled them out enough that he could get behind the knots and snipped them off. Which is exactly what I would have done at home on my own had he not warned me under pain of death to never pull at those stitches.

When all was said and done, he cleared me to return to light duty or limited duty or any other duty which would guarantee that I wouldn't have to lift or pull or push anything weighing more than 20 pounds or 9 kilos. Unfortunately, my current place of employment doesn't have any light duty or limited duty positions available in my department. I will be forced to continue to use my huge stash of illness and vacation hours which allow me to receive full pay for watching TV at home all day.

Darn it.

But then we get to the bad news.

I was watching a movie while downloading some files and burning a CD when suddenly the program doing the downloading pops up an error box. Something about not being able to save to Drive D:. Might have errors. Need to run CHKDSK or something.

Odd. I don't think I've ever seen an error message quite like that one before. Well, probably just a glitch. Let's try saving again. Same error. In fact, a little experimenting showed that I couldn't do much of anything with Drive D: at all.

Curious. Well, it's nothing that a reboot won't solve. Ctrl-Alt-Del. Error, can't load OS, necessary files missing, copy files and reboot.

After I last I installed Windows, I decided against installing various service packs and critical updates. I did this so that my Windows installation would be identical to that on the original CD. Why? Well, last time I tried to repair a Windows installation, I was told that I couldn't because I'd updated and the Windows setup program refused to touch it because it was a later version than what was on the CD.

I tried to repair, knowing that it couldn't complain about versions this time. Instead, it complained that it couldn't find an existing Windows installation on Drive D: at all. In fact, Drive D: didn't exist as far as the setup program was concerned.

Luckily, I still had Drive C: with its completely borked Windows installation from a few months back. It wouldn't boot, but did still exist according the the setup program. I installed a fresh copy of Windows on it, entered the serial number from memory (I kid you not), and tried to access D: again. Windows says that it exists but that it is not formatted.

I downloaded some data recovery utilities and found one that works. Apparently, something overwrote some of the directory information so, even though the files are all(?) there, Windows can't locate them. Naturally, the bad directory entries include Windows, Program Files, Application Data, and Panic. But the utility is letting me access the files. I'd love to just copy all the files to another drive and be done with it, but natually this happened to the largest harddrive I owned, the one I was using to store all the really big files from all the other drives in all my other computers.

I just got my DVD+RW drive working again, so I guess I'll be copying a few big files at a time and making some of those backup copies that I've been meaning to make.

And if you don't see any more updates for a while, at least you'll know why.

Copyright 2005 by Troy H. Cheek. Reprint with prior written permission only. Comments and questions to