Broke My Wrist While Roller-Blading

Two saturdays ago, I went to east coast park with a joyous mood and rented a pair of roller-blades. Unexpectedly, I broke my right wrist an hour or two later. I think it is pretty ironic that I broke my right wrist when I hardly even fall while roller-blading nowadays. I have taken my body for granted all this time thinking that nothing will ever happen, but the truth is exactly reverse of my thoughts. Human bodies are just so fragile and all it takes is one fall to take away the use of my dominant hand.

While I have been smiling all this time, there is a great deal of pain involved with the fall and procedures to fix my wrist. However, beyond the pain, there lies an even greater pain of inability to use my dominant hand and this feeling was especially strong after my operation, as I struggled to move my hands even a couple of millimetres apart. However, I can see some improvement over just a day by strictly following the exercises that my hand therapist advised me to take up. These hourly exercises takes me about 30 minutes to complete each time, which means that I’m exercising my hand half the time that I’m awake.

Honestly, this incident makes me scared of life. If my right hand can be taken away within a matter of split seconds, so can my left hand, all my limbs or even my life. Of course, since the incident had occured, there’s nothing much I can do other than to move on with life as much as possible.

For instance, the day after I broke my right wrist, I started practising to write with my left hand for the whole day and was eventually able to write, though extremely uglily but I just needed myself to recognize the words, since I learnt to write with my left hand just in case I was asked to jot down meeting minutes at work. Over time, I learnt a couple of things which I never knew I would need to do, such as bathing without my right hand. Washing the left arm became a difficult task, but you’ll figure out how if you were in the situation.

This incident not only make me realize how fragile we are, but it also makes me realize that we are actually quite adaptable creatures. Losing the use of my right hand does not seem to stop me from doing a lot of things that I have been doing with my right hand. In fact, my non-dominant hand went beyond its call of duty and was able to perform every task by myself, so I went back to work as per normal despite my injury.

However, I am still quite sad over my right hand, although it can at least move a little now. Who would ever think that my most precious hand would become so useless even if it’s just for a period of time. Now, I got to get back to my exercises again…