Skin Tinsel Strength (Holiday Pun + Handy Injury)
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I’d recommend getting back on the bike and pedaling with your feet
That’s what Dirt would do, right?
Sorry that I’m late coming to this thread. It has been a rather odd week.
I smashed/sliced my finger about 2 months ago. I had 6 stitches, a complete break of the bone furthest out on my middle finger on my left hand, as well as a cross fracture perpendicular to the break.
I asked the doc if I could ride with this and she said yes with an asterisk. The important thing is to keep the stitches dry and not use the finger in a way that will put pressure on the stitches.
Before I go on, let me be completely clear that I’m 100% positive that my doctor’s idea of going for a bike ride is completely different from my own. I purposefully did NOT do anything to bridge that gap. This is a very important thing to realize.
Protect the finger: I used a metal splint that covered the top and bottom of the finger. This limited my movement and made sure that I wasn’t putting stress on it when I shouldn’t.
Keep it clean: I used non-stick gauze pads with a healthy amount of first aid ointment of your choice. Make sure to not make any of this so tight that it cuts off the circulation.
Glove it — or not: I cut the middle finger out of a few sets of old gloves and used those. Keeping my finger colder helped keep it from sweating. That kept it dry. You gotta be careful with this because wounds like this don’t like getting so cold that circulation is compromised. I was fortunate to injure myself when it was a little warmer than it is right now. Riding with temps in the mid 40s or higher wasn’t a problem. Here’s a photo of my glove/splint set up… seen here giving a naughty finger gesture next to DaveK’s amazing removable toenails: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrogringo/8037977338
Glove it Part 2: Invest in good surgical gloves. Pretty much any daily activity that involves something that might mess with your finger should be done while gloved-up. After week 1 I switched from surgical gloves to automotive gloves. They’re tougher. They’re not sterile, but the bandage and/or splint provides that kind of protection. They really hold up to using the hand much better than anything available over the counter at the drug store. Plus you can get them in blue, purple, orange or red. Sorry. No pink. I tried.
One last thing on this department…. Trust me, you do NOT want to re-injure your thumb. You REALLY REALLY don’t want to do that… especially with stitches. The ways to fix stitches that tear are not at all pretty. You thought it was bad the first time? It is much, much, much worse the second time. I won’t go into detail, but just imagine the worst and it is probably somewhere in the ballpark. If the original fix was a 4 or 5 on the pain scale, doing it the second time is somewhere in the 14-18 range. The doctors, nurses and techs will all also tell you that you’re a dumb-ass.
Okay… If you can do the above stuff pretty well, then read on and ride at your own risk.
The middle finger on my left hand is a pretty important one for working brakes. You get quite a bit of power with that finger. For that reason, I rode bikes that have REALLY good brakes. I found that I was able to ride and not use my middle finger. It might be quite different with your thumb and it also depends where the actual wound is. You’ll need to figure that out.
My injury allowed me to ride as long as I didn’t use the finger to shift or brake. Once I got it immobilized and some provision for keeping it clean and dry, I rode as much as my pain level would let me. I was off the bike completely for about 18 hours. In the beginning, I didn’t do any kind of long rides. I did little trips to the store and before long I did commute.
My first big ride was a 130+ mile fixie mountain bike ride in Montgomery County with the Diamond Derby added on at the end. I think that was 4 days after the injury. It might have been 5. A week later I rode the MoCo Epic (140 miles) on my fixie mountain bike.
Day 6 I found the stitches on the side of my finger were doing more harm than good, so I removed them. The ones on the pad of my finger were still needed, so they went the full 15 days and I let the doc remove those. They’d healed into the wound enough that it took a bit of skill for the tech to remove them neatly.
The 2-4 days after getting the stitches out required me being EVEN MORE CAREFUL than when the stitches were in. That is kind of a critical time for the wound. Not only is the whole thing still healing, but all the little holes from the stitches are healing too.
After that it was just a matter of keeping it clean and not using the finger more than the break will allow. There’s no real benefit to splinting the finger to help the break in the bone, so after the first 10 days I just put a band-aid on to keep it clean and dry.
More in a moment…
Dirt
Next topic: Nerve damage.
Frankenfinger has had some lovely stuff going on in the nerve department. The nerves were small enough that there was no way to surgically repair them. They needed to heal or not on their own. The good news is that the healing process has been a nice, steady progression and the weird nerve stuff happens less often and with less severity.
Weird stuff 1) I spent about 3 weeks with Frankenfinger feeling like she (yes, my middle finger is a she) was being dunked in cold water all the time. It did a lot of the normal feeling things that fingers do, but they were just done with the feeling that my finger was constantly cold and wet. That is really odd. It is weird to wake up in the middle of the night and feel that way. What was really cool was that it started happening less often and associated with some random activity. I could reach into a box to pick something up and 4 fingers would feel normal and Frankenfinger would tell me that the box was full of ice water.
Weird stuff 2) Touching stuff that is normal temperature feels hot. I still get occasional feelings like Frankenfinger is touching something really hot when she isn’t. Again, this is really odd when the other fingers are saying all is well.
Not so weird stuff 1) Broken bones just hurt. There’s a certain level of pain at all times with a broken bone. The fracture is healed and the main bone break has started to stitch itself together. It still hurts at some level 24/7. Most of the time it isn’t bad. These days I reach for the Advil once or twice per week.
So far I have not done anything that even comes close to re-injuring it. Since it is an extremity injury, I always check it to make sure it is getting normal circulation. I only occasionally put a band-aid on it if I know I’m going to be doing something dirty or that will have me putting pressure on the wound at all. I splint and glove if I’m doing anything like wrenching. That makes it so that I don’t use the finger for something that I shouldn’t.
The big thing with nerve damage is to use the finger and get it used to normal fingery things. Frankenfinger talks to me all the time. She still hasn’t lost her fingernail yet. That will likely happen in the next week or so. I’ve been very careful with her and haven’t done anything to accelerate the nail’s removal. The new fingernail is really growing in nicely under the existing one. I’d guess that it is 1/2 way out the nail already. The old nail is really just barely stuck there, but there’s been nothing to snag, so it hasn’t accidentally been pulled or pried off. That is a very good thing.
I hope that is somewhat helpful. And since TTIUWOP, I’ll add in some photos from the day I got the stitches out.
Courtesy of my friend Beej.
Courtesy of my friend Mark
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