one-handed

I couldn’t decide whether to write this with just one hand, or one hand plus an awkward claw of a hand, or speech-to-text with a bunch of inevitable typos. Turns out the least frustrating but goofiest approach is to talk to my computer and clumsily fix typos with my left hand.

I had a wrist arthroscopy + TFCC repair operation done one week ago. I didn’t think much of it beforehand except, knowing that I wouldn’t have a right hand for six weeks, I cleaned my apartment, prepared some meals and took the day off for surgery. I gave work a heads up.

Days one and two post-op were comical, in retrospect. I actually started working around 7am feeling pretty okay, but as the nerve block wore off, searing pain in my wrist started monotonically increasing. I was in the middle of a data quality meeting when a colleague mistook my contorted face for distaste toward the meeting, which made me realize that I failed to not only set expectations for myself but also for my coworkers. I frantically maxed out acetaminophen and ibuprofen while moving non-urgent meetings and unblocking multiple projects. I don’t have any prior experience taking oxycodone, but turns out it’s very effective at providing pain relief, at the low cost of your brain becoming a pile of cotton. Every minute for the next 60ish hours, I timed my painkillers and vacillated between pain-free and semi-conscious, or enduring what felt like getting my wrist actively cut open while trying to conceptualize proper auto-renewable subscription states.

Why didn’t I just take time off? Maybe I think I’m really self-important and crucial to these projects or I didn’t delegate and empower people properly. Or maybe I was already playing post-vacation catchup and recognized that I occupy a decision-making role and have a lot of context in a lot of initiatives. I could’ve definitely dropped some things, but I don’t think it’s crazy to take my job seriously and suffer a little bit on account of my poor planning. Next time (knock on wood), I will definitely do more upfront work in preparation for taking some time off for surgery.

I’m fine now, which is to say my brain is my own again and I can stick this log of an arm in a sling and go outside. Now to test the limits of speech-to-text software as we enter this performance review cycle.