I’m ready to have this thumb healed and back to normal. I can’t count how many times it hits the space bar on the computer or how often I bang it in some fashion. Buttoning shirts is a real pain. I’ve finally gotten the process of tying my shoelaces working fairly well. Yesterday tying a necktie took almost ten minutes! I don’t want to think about the effort involved if the impacted thumb were on my dominant (right) hand! I think everything would be immensely more difficult.

It is making progress. I went back for the 3rd visit to the thumb doctor on Monday, the 31st. He noticed that there is indeed still a stitch in my thumb. Rather than dig it out, he said we’d wait until the scab started to come off before taking it out, unless a problem came up in the meantime.

Twice I day I’m supposed to take the dressing off, soak the thumb in some warm water with a few drops of betadine for twenty minutes, let the thumb get completely dry, and put a new dressing on it. I’ve several colors of surgical tape to apply and have tried a couple of combinations to give a multi-colored look.

The tape itself is quite interesting. It doesn’t stick to my skin, but it does stick to itself and after a couple of hours, seems to stick even more to itself. The entire wrap first consists of a small pad of non-stick material, a few layers of gauze, followed by tape to hold it all together. The whole process from setting up the soak through completion of the wrap takes about a half-hour. I try to couple that with something else, like eating dinner or reading the newspaper — importantly, something that can be done one-handed.

At the rate this is healing, I think it’ll be another six weeks before I can lose the bandage. My next dr. appt is on April 14th. The dr. indicated that the next milestone in the healing process is to have the entire wound scabbed over. Most of the wound does not currently have a scab, so that’s going to take some time.

In the meantime, all spelling and grammatical mistakes are the fault of the thumb. There is no other explanation….