Monica

We solved the sling. It is all to stupid for words. The first two weeks post op are crucial for correct recovery. We wasted them on needless pointless torture because I am fat. We'll find out the extent of the catastrophe tomorrow afternoon.

She did this terrible, nightmarish dangerous thing to me without examination or measuring me based entirely on her first glance at me from the hallway. I could have lost some fingers or the whole hand. I could have had nerve damage. I have no idea if the bones healed right.

I suspect they were treating me at the surgeon's office on Friday like I was crazy and hysterical because the things I was telling them made no sense. It was likely inconceivable to them that a PT would over ride a surgeon like that to do something so pointlessly damaging to a patient, so clearly I must be saying it wrong.

We were planning for Squirrel to come into the appointments as a third party to explain things since I am not in great shape from two weeks of extreme sleep deprivation necessary for holding my arm as still as possible and keeping the arm from falling out of the sling and the constant battle to keep massaging blood into my hand.

We are still doing the Squirrel talks to the doctor thing because "PT knew the surgeon had messed up when she saw I was fat from the hallway" can't sound anything other than insanity. I'm keeping the sling fitting appointment because I have now directions for things like proper strap and arm position for the normal people sling only the special fat people torture device one which I don't trust for obvious reasons.

How did we solve it you may ask? I was taking things out of the bag from the hospital to put away, retrieving the papers with things like sleep directions, when I looked down and saw my entire arm had slithered out of the sling for the second time. I must have been holding the Forbidden Sling at the time. In my alarm, I put what I was holding down and went to get Squirrel to fix the arm issue.

It's black. I set it on the canvass back pack next to wear the bags go. Camouflage. The arm thing was so dramatic since I wasn't used to having to manhandle it back in constantly yet. I thought I was doing something wrong because they hadn't mentioned how easy it was for the arm to fall out of an immobility sling. I had intended to put the forbidden sling next to the sink to use when I showered. When we couldn't find it anywhere I thought I must have misremembered things given I'd had my bones stolen earlier that day and anesthesia recovery.

When the forearm began to deteriorate precipitously I searched again in hopes because I thought that having a sling that would hold my wrist at a natural angle and not restrict blood to the hand might help, and my normal sling had likely slid between the desk and the filing cabinet and I was struggling to cope with the pain the jostling from breathing was causing, so crawling around on the floor trying to keep the arm from falling out of the sling while the arm felt like it was being stabbed, flayed, and set on fire all at once. I couldn't do a thorough search because of my condition.

By Sunday, my neck, back, shoulder, and arm muscles were exhausted from almost two weeks of having to constantly try to hold the arm still without help from the sling. Keep in mind I wasn't meant to be using the shoulder at all if I could help it because you are supposed to give it as close to complete rest as humanly possible, but because of the special fat person torture sling that wasn't physically possible. Even the trick of sitting at my desk using a pillow in my lap to take some of the weight off my shoulder and trapping the arm between my stomach and the desk couldn't help any more because the shoulder muscles were just done.

I could think a little better with the Millennial altered sling because my hand was better and if I kept my wrist still enough it didn't hurt that much more than the surgery. I hadn't seen the bags during the Friday search, but the little table where things going to the car like bags go is cluttered, and had a lot of extra stuff I'd forgotten to stow in the hectic couple of days before surgery. I decided to see if I'd left the sling in a bag by accident and found it on the back pack.

Squirrel put me in it and built the stabilization nest before leaving for game. Millennial altered sling went into the wash as I wanted to run that after Goth Millennial bathed me so I could produce it in evidence for the doctor and explain why we had to alter it and why everything had gone to shit and why we went against medical orders and had me wear the Forbidden Sling.

So I'm lying there using meditation to try to unclench the muscles I'd spent all that time training never to relax, and I notice what feels like darted fabric against my forearm skin similar to the Millennial alterations to the other sling. O.o. So I felt the parts of the sling I'd never seen because I was looking from above. I'd had a neural block so there had been no chance of me feeling the dart in the couple hours before it had been confiscated because I was "too big." (She kept talking about how big I was and how that that was a problem to me and the nurses. I'm short. There is no ambiguity here.)

The sling had been carefully hand altered.

If it had really been the wrong sling it would have been generic.

They'd measured me for the sling at a pre-op appointment. It had been carefully altered to match my arm which was why it was so small. It had been a size large because you need more fabric to do alterations, so she replaced a custom fitted sling that had been cut down from a large so as to do essential work in the crucial first two weeks with a generic extra large I could have fit both arms plus random cargo into that compressed my hand and held my wrist at an angle it can't go without a lot of force and immobilizing hand and wrist and providing almost no support for a shoulder that had literally just been replaced.

Every other sling any of us had ever seen had let the thumb and fingers poke out, but the hole for that was in my armpit in the Special Fat Person Torture Sling. She either didn't notice or didn't care.

She kept looking at me like she'd never seen a fat person before and acting like there had never been one in short term post surgical. This was certainly not the case. I've had surgery there a lot. I've seen plenty of people a lot bigger than me. Squirrel works there and is like yeah they have plenty of bariatric supplies and there are other fat patients in the hospital all the time so them not having any experience with fat people at the hospital is exactly as weird as it seemed to recovering from anesthesia at the time. (To be clear there is nothing wrong with being fat. I'm not ashamed. I'm mentioning the range of fat people they help regularly to try to convey how weird it was that no one seemed to have any kind of training to deal with not skinny people and that I was not remotely unusual. If I had required bariatric equipment, I still would have deserved to be treated like a person. Everyone deserves to be treated like a person. I'm visibly queer and other staff were using pronouns. I can't remember if she got mine right or not. I can't rule it out, but she never mentioned it, whereas she made clear repeatedly that she was doing this because I'm big).

She could have examined the sling, but she would have had to see me as a person instead of assuming all fat people automatically needed an XL sling for all medical situations regardless of size. She could have measured me to see what size sling would be normal for a person my actual size, but she'd have had to look at and touch me to do that and she could barely force herself to do that during the confiscation. She could have called someone more experienced who'd seen a shoulder replacement sling and/or a fat person before to ask if the sling looked wrong to her. She could have checked my chart. She could have called upstairs to ask if they were sure they had the right sling. She could have called the surgeon or surgeon's office. She could have looked at the custom sling properly while cannibalizing it for a belly strap. She could have actually looked at the fit after hastily and squeamishly putting it on me and thought, "Shouldn't I see fingers?" and stopped to think for a minute.

It took me about a minute to think of all these options that would have been simple and common sense. She couldn't take even a minute to think of one of them.

She did this dangerous horrifically damaging and painful thing without a single thought. Not a one.

I'm sure nothing will happen to her. She'll likely never even be told what she did so she would know not to do it again.

I spent two weeks in hell just because she glanced at me from the hall, saw I wasn't thin, and never noticed or thought through anything after.

None of it was necessary.

I wish I could find out right now how fucked I am on arm recovery. Afternoon feels a long time away.

I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to post something this personal about my health, but I think people need to know because shoulder replacement is a pretty common surgery once you pass a certain age.

Did I mention I had to talk her into letting me keep the forbidden sling. She was really reluctant. She almost threw it out.