I spent another five days in hospital.

Saturday was the first full day after the op, and I woke up considerably more human than I’d gone to sleep. I was still under the influence of the general and the morphine and whatever else they’d given me to keep the pain and/or consciousness away, but I was capable of dragging myself to the toilet and using it once I was there, and I counted this as progress.

My arm was enormous. It was swollen to maybe twice its normal size and in quite considerable discomfort but the most striking thing was the weight: I could barely lift it at all. A physiotherapist came to the ward sometime before lunch and had me work my wrist, elbow and shoulder, and showed me some simple exercises to help loosen them all up. I was slightly aghast—and told her so—that I was being encouraged to exercise my arm the day after a brace of plates, a pin and 10-15 screws had been put into it through an 8-inch incision, but the physio just smiled thinly and told me that this is how it is nowadays. No more wrist-to-shoulder cast and 6 weeks off; now, physiotherapy and exercise straight off the bat are considered the best way to regain full or nearly full movement.

Visiting time rolled around and I was besieged by visitors. Friends, family, band- and workmates came by in heavy rotation for the whole afternoon while I sat in the wipe-clean chair beside my bed and recited the circumstances leading up to my current state to each and every new group. I was rather humbled by it all, despite a rueful suspicion that it was rather like finding out who’d come to your funeral.

Hospital routine set in over the next couple of days: the lights were rudely thrown on around 6 or 7am (depending on how authoritarian the night shift was); breakfast, lunch and dinner were accompanied by temperature measurements, blood pressure tests and pills and occasionally a subcutaneous Warfarin injection in one’s stomach; cups of tea arrived at regular intervals, and the lights would go out again at 9 or 10pm.

At this point the night chorus would begin. My roommates were a couple of older chaps recovering from falls, and a talkative motorcyclist with an almost comical number of injuries. Both of his forearms were strapped up; two fingers were splinted; his right foot was in a cast and his brows were fractured. During the day he would shuffle around lamenting his luck and waving his arms above his head to reduce the swelling, and at night he would be consumed by sleep apnoea. He would snore uncontrollably, lapsing into silence for seconds at a time and then jerk back to the normal rhythm with one massive snorting intake of breath. The two older chaps slept on their backs, snoring gently but supplementing this by belching and breaking wind, occasionally waking themselves with the thundering ferocity of their emissions.

My arm hurt. The ward sounded like broken plumbing. It was hard to sleep.

The weekend came and went without sight of a doctor, although I seemed to be in one piece and my blood pressure—high after the operation—dropped steadily back to normal. Unfortunately for my chances of getting out on Monday, my temperature spiked at 39.5°C on Sunday.

Dr Ng, one of the surgeons who had worked on my arm, appeared on Monday morning to take stock of the situation. He carried out a few tests and checked my chart, making some cryptic remarks into a dictaphone (“Patient was pyrexial over the weekend; positive for Froment’s sign; adduction weak but present,”), and then explained the operation and its results in detail.

Having cut open my elbow they broke the tip of the ulna, the lower bone in my forearm, to get access to the elbow joint. (Yup, that’s right: as Doug pointed out, they further broke my arm before fixing it.) They reassembled the fractured humerus as best they could, screwing two plates into it to hold it together, and then moved the bruised ulnar nerve out of its normal path and to the inside of the elbow joint. The tip of the ulna was fastened back in place with a pin and a wire, and the incision was closed by about 30 staples. The whole procedure took about three or four hours. This is the X-ray he showed me a couple of days later, on my discharge:

X-ray (after)

X-ray (after): pins and needles

A cheerful nurse named Leo had taken off the fabric dressing. I couldn’t see much apart from a ridge of skin being crimped together by a few staples, but Dr Ng took a look at it and declared it good. “Because of your temperature, I want to keep you under observation for a couple of days. We’ll reassess whether you can be discharged then.”

So I spent the next three days chafing at my semi-imprisonment. It was odd: having had this apparently major operation, increasingly small things began to niggle at me. I’d already managed to have the drip (there to keep the line open for the neglected morphine pump) disconnected on Saturday, and the next irritation was the cannula sticking out of my hand. Once that was dispensed with a friendly pharmacist called Christoph took me off the IV antibiotics I’d been on since the operation, and stopped the anticoagulant Warfarin injections since I was able to get up and about under my own steam. Another physio—the third in as many days, and a student this time—had me walk up and down some stairs to show I could manage back in the real world. Each move back to normality felt like a small victory.

The last really odious condition of my internment was the food. I hadn’t really registered how vile it was until Monday lunch, when we were brought a lukewarm, sludgy approximation of pasta & sauce which caused me to gag a little as I choked it back. Devon*, who seemed to have an instinctive distrust of hospital food even without my mentioning it, had already offered to bring in dinner for me one night. At the time I refused, thinking that this was above and beyond the call of visitation duty.

The pasta broke me. I left a voicemail pleading for some normal food.

Jeff & Devon arrived on Tuesday night bearing aluminium trays of lamb and sautéed potatoes. Devon cut the rack into single-rib bite-size pieces for me and I popped them one by one into my mouth. It was great. I could have cried with gratitude. I slept soundly that night: the swelling of my arm was finally retreating, my belly was full of real food and my pills had been scaled back to a simple combo of paracetamol and ibuprofen.

I was nervous waiting for the rounds on Wednesday morning. Dr Ng arrived, looked over my charts and checked the wound again, then told me I could go home. I gingerly pulled on my clothes—a final victory!—called my Mum, who had offered to ferry me home, and paced around the ward until she arrived. The nurses gave me a couple of boxes of painkillers and a week-long course of oral antibiotics, and I was sent on my way. And that was it: just less than a week after smashing my elbow into bits, I walked out with a bruised and tender bionic arm, a handful of pills and a physiotherapy appointment. I’ve got around 45° of movement in the elbow; my pinkie and ring finger are more or less out of commission until the ulnar nerve recovers (which could take anywhere from a month to a year); my GP wrote me a sick note for the two weeks off work, and that’s that. Fin.

* Jeff & Devon visited every day from Saturday through to the day before I was discharged. They are awesome. The brought me glorious food, magazines, fruit and Dr Who Top Trumps, and you can’t say fairer than that. Well, you could argue that they should have let the invalid win at Dr Who Top Trumps every now and again, but perhaps I’m being churlish.