Murphy's law

(Special Note: This blog post is being composed by Windows speech recognition. I feel a little bit like a cross between Stephen Hawking and Roger Ebert!)

Wow. I was so excited that the year has been off to a great start. It's amazing to me how quickly things can change. As a huge proponent of networking I have always stuck by my guns that my next job was going to come through someone I had helped along the way in the process of looking for work.

In the course of doing my research for a really good opportunity about two years ago, through LinkedIn, I contacted a former employee of a company I was pursuing. She was extremely helpful, very thorough in her knowledge of the inner workings of the company, and on top of that, a very nice, friendly contact, who was willing to help in any way she could. Since that first e-mail, we have stayed in touch for two years, we've continued to look out for each other professionally, and she even offered me the opportunity to stay, at no charge, in her apartment in Connecticut when my current housing at the time fell through. We like and respect one another and will each do anything we can to help, when the need arises.

Apparently she had met up with a distributor of a very high-end French skin care line looking for an East Coast business development manager. She gave this woman my name and out of the blue, late last Saturday afternoon, my phone rang. The distributor wanted me to meet with her in New York without ever seeing my resume. So I made plans to hop on a train on Monday afternoon for a 5:00 meeting. In further 'as luck would have it' coincidences, when I went to the French Website to do my research, it turns out that I am personally connected to their newly appointed distributor in the UK. To me, all signs were pointing to YES!!

The weather that weekend was not very nice - it snowed most of the day on Saturday, was cold on Sunday, and drizzled on and off most of Monday morning and early into Monday afternoon. I got to the train station at 2:30 paid for my parking spot at 2:35 in the antiquated slot system setup that they have for people who need to park there for the day. From there the layout of the train station is such that you have to go down a flight of stairs through a tunnel and back up another flight of stairs to reach the platform where you purchase your ticket and wait for the train. The stairs are outdoors. Without going into a ton of details, basically I fell down the entire flight of concrete stairs due to the bad weather. I'm lucky to be alive right now, and not have a traumatic brain injury, or be sitting permanently in a wheelchair. I guess I should be thanking my lucky stars. But instead I am in pain. I have multiple traumatic fractures of my left proximal humerus and crushed the tuberosity to bits. In other words, I pretty much annihilated my left arm.


In the emergency room, the Dr. would not give me any pain medication until he had seen my ex rays-- which took forever. When he finally did approve pain medication, it was such a low dose it didn't help. He then send me home, without surgery, in nothing but a sling. It took me three days to get an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. I cannot believe the unprofessionalism I encountered in trying to put my arm back together. Offices didn't call me back, another office told me they didn't want cash patients, and one practice with eight doctors told me that no one in their practice specialized in actual broken arm bones, they only treated sports injuries and muscle tears. What? What? What?

I finally was able to get through at one practice. As luck would have it, three of the doctors in that practice were names given to me by people when I asked them for recommendations of good surgeons. I figured I would start at the top, and I asked for an appointment with the name on the masthead of the practice. I was lucky I got in, and he could see me the next day. The minute he took a look at my ex rays and saw how much pain I was in, he scheduled me for surgery the next day. I was unconscious for 3 hours while he put a titanium locking plate and 10 screws into the head of the bone in my upper arm. Let me tell you, that is one big incision!He also had to sew my rotator cuff back together with internal stitches because the force of the trauma to the bone was so strong, it tore away from the bone. OUCH!

Every phone call I had made to that practice, every person I have spoken to, every technician who has walked me back past the front door, taken information or worked with me in any way has been so nice and so professional (so far), that I am beyond surprised. I can't even imagine how I would have been treated by these practices that never even called me back. So, maybe this is a case of "everything happens for a reason."

Unfortunately, my at-home experience immediately after surgery ran into a few snags. I was put on an automatic ice machine and told to leave it on with no more details than that and no instructions. As it turns out, I was given a model with no temperature regulator, and there is metal my arm. Now I'm not a scientist, but I know that metal conducts energy, and with that math, 'freezing' was probably just a little bit too cold for my newly reconstructed arm. I kept getting the chills (while on a continuous nerve block), but attributed it to the anesthesia wearing off and my nerves. Finally, after a weekend in agony, I called the emergency Dr. On call, and asked if it was OK to take it off. That was a little bit of relief. However, I still felt like my skin was burning, and I thought perhaps I had some kind of human freezer burn. When I went for my first post-op appointment, and they began to remove the dressing and surgical padding covering the incision, my entire chest was red and irritated and covered with welts, due to an allergy or some type of sensitivity to the glue on their non latex tape. No wonder!!!

Well, by comparison, that has made the last six days a walk in the park. I have a ton of bone pain, muscle fatigue, and general surgical discomfort that is more than manageable while awake. That's the good news. The bad news is that my bedroom, I now refer to as "that torture chamber." I haven't slept a full night since the day I broke my arm. I'm exhausted. But I'm healing. It's going to be a LONG road. And since I can't drive legally for quite some time, this MAY put a damper on my job search. I can't even go back to one of my part time jobs until I can put some real clothes on!