I know its been a while since I've been here, seems I've had some healing to do from a pinched nerve in my left elbow. I also have confession to make; I thought that this surgery would be a walk-in walk out type of thing and I would be back at work, maybe the next day. I even joked with the nurses who were doing my pre-admittance about having surgery and how simple they have gone for me. I even had one nurse tell me about a surgery she had, and upon waking, finding a phone number written in her hand from someone present at the time. Now I have had angioplasty twice, one stent, back surgery on L4 and L5 and C3 and C5 and numerous skin cancers removed. But when I woke up from nerve relief surgery on the elbow with my arm in a sling and twice its size and four pounds of ice strapped to it I began to worry. Pain medication doesn't work on the pain it only dulls the senses that feels the pain (does that make since?) Looking at my wrappings, and judging by the pain I imagined my arm cut from shoulder to wrist and evidently I couldn't convey or phrase coherently the burning question of WTF happened? I think I was somewhere six hours out that I realized the first thing I usually do with my left hand and over the course of the next week how many more things I did with my left hand or how many things I did that takes both hands. When the time came for my dressing to be changed, my youngest daughter, who by the way used to be a EMT with a morbid slant, wanted to change the dressing the first time and even tugged at the stitches with the usual ooh and ahh's she is known to emit when she is enjoying someone's medical condition. It was then that I saw the incision was only five or six inches long. Hell that didn't explain why my whole arm felt as though it had been through an old fashioned clothes ringer. I guess most painful was the fact that my hand was void of any writings, no smiley's or phone numbers.