After some downpours of rain during the week, the weekend has been blessed by some beautiful spring weather with highs in mid 60s F / upper teens C. It was a short week given that last Monday was the May bank holiday. It was good to be back working (still from home for now).
On Thursday, I returned to Tallaght University Hospital for a follow up appointment two weeks after my surgery. The orthopedics department was quite busy, and even though I had an appointment scheduled, I had to wait more than an hour before my name was called. Other patients appeared to have been waiting even longer. They were a mix of old and young, men and women, wearing a variety of casts or supports on their limbs. first, I was seen by a nurse who removed the plaster/splint from my arm and cleaned up the incision area. The skin on my arm feels numb due to the fact they had to cut through some nerves to repair the tendon. Most of the feeling should come back though. I was then sent back into the waiting area with my bare arm in a sling around my neck to wait for a doctor to see me. It was probably another 30-45 minutes when my name was called again. The doctor was from India or Pakistan, and I believe he was the one on call when I was discharged from the hospital after my surgery. He asked me a few questions but mostly just made some notes in my chart, without even looking at my arm. He said he wanted to see me in three weeks and then instructed me to report to the occupational therapy (OT) departnent down the hall.
The OT department consisted of a small waiting area with seats for a handful of people and a small consultation room behind a closed door. on the door was a computer printed notice saying to knock on the door to check in, which I did, prompting a friendly male nurse to pop out. They had my chart and were expecting me. There was a woman already in the waiting area whom the nurse addressed, saying she would be next. The nurse turned back to me saying it would be about 20 minutes before I would be seen, so I had tine to get a coffee if I wanted. There’s a Starbucks branded cafe in the atrium-like lobby of Tallaght University Hospital, and following the nurse’s suggestion, I headed there figuring it would be a better place to wait than in the cramped waiting area. Once at the cafe, I ordered a latte and chocolate brownie and sat down at a vacant table. The coffee did not taste great, but I drank it anyway, while the brownie was passable. Along the walls of the lobby were small exhibits with highlights of the hospital’s history.dating back to the 1800s.
I returned to the OT department, and the friendly nurse reappeared not long after to attend to me. He led me to a small area of just down the hall where orthopedic equipment was stored. The protocol for distal bicep tendon physiotherapy requires that I wear a range of motion (ROM) brace for 6 weeks. This limits how far I can extend my arm straight, so that the tendon has time to heal and prevents re-injury. In addition, I am not supposed to rotate my wrist more than 45 degrees downward into a pronated position (i.e., palm facing downward) Although the brace itself does not prevent me from doing so. Obviously this presents a challenge to typing on a computer keyboard. In anticipation of this, I have ordered a split vertical keyboard that can be positioned at an angle. Unfortunately, it’s taking longer than expected to arrive, so for the time being I’ll be pecking away with my left hand only and using speech-to-text whenever possible (that’s how I’m writing most of this blog post). At any rate, the brace is much more comfortable than the plaster/splint I have been wearing, and I can take it off for showering, put it on over a longsleeve shirts, etc. However, I should wear the brace 24/7 and must avoid put any weight load on the bicep muscle lest the tendon be re-torn.
It seems like most of my friends were traveling away this weekend or had other plans, so I’ve been left to my own devices. On Saturday, I finally had an opportunity to meet up with a couple of my older Irish “aunties” (distant cousins) who were in Dublin for the day. We met at the Easons flagship store on O’Connell Street where there is a café on the top floor. I reminisced with them about the 2007 trip that several of my family members made from the U.S. to Ireland together. And of course they asked me about how I was finding life in Dublin, I told them about what had happened to my arm, and we chatted about other topics over the course of an hour and a half or so. After parting with them, I stopped into a couple of shops on the way back home.
My apartment has become a little more cluttered due to my partial incapacitation, so I spent some time tidying up, folding laundry, etc. — tasks that are still not easy to do with my right arm in a brace, but better than before. In the late afternoon, my landlord called to check in on me (which he has done a couple of times since my injury) and to coordinate a time to meet up so I could pay him two months’ rent as has been our ongoing arrangement. With no other plans, I offered to take the DART train down to Dalkey and meet him there. he was watching rugby at a pub in the village center, and we had a few rounds of Guinness while alternating between conversation and watching the match. We were seated at the bar, but in the back part of the pub there were several tables arranged in the room to face the large wall-mounted flat screen TV. It was packed with young and old Irish sports enthusiasts, a very typical scene that was taking place in pubs across the island. I spent the better part of three hours there and enjoyed getting to know my landlord even better as we shared stories about our past, thoughts about current events, our mid-life dating experiences, etc. We dispensed with the business part of our meeting as we stood up to leave as an afterthought. it was still light out as I returned to the DART station and waited for a train back to the city centre. There were many young people heading into Dublin for a night out on the town. I walked back home and made dinner since I hadn’t had anything to eat in hours, then settled in for the evening.
I had moved my weekly SuperValu grocery delivery to Sunday morning to accommodates the meet up with my Irish cousins. The weather on Sunday was even better than Saturday. In the afternoon I met up with my friend J for a walk around town, stopping in a few shops here and there for random things we were both hunting. I’ve been at home for the rest of the day, catching up on small projects and just relaxing in general. There are still plenty of people out in Temple Bar given the good weather and lingering evening daylight.
The biggest news in the past few days is Sinn Féin’s electoral victory in Northern Ireland. For the first time since the Good Friday agreement set in place a system of shared governance, Sinn Féin will hold the largest number of seats in the Stormont (the Northern Ireland parliament). This entitles them to appoint the first minister, although this is wholly symbolic as the deputy first minister is vested with equal power. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which supports continuing the close ties between Britain and NI and espouses more socially conservative values, is relegated to second place, having lost seats to the Alliance Party (the number of seats for Sinn Féin actually stayed the same). An article on the RTÉ website summarises the significance of this outcome: Stormont election result ‘ushers in new era’
also, for more background about the political parties in Northern Ireland, here’s my post from 2021 marking the 100th anniversary of the partition:
Until next time….
