Hematoma

I had been up on the ladder all summer scraping and painting the house. I was just putting the final touches on the porch, standing on an dining room chair, when I leaned over one millimeter and made the chair slip off the porch, with me on it. It happened so fast, I was kind of in shock, but I knew it was a bad fall, so I told myself, "I should scream so Josh comes over here" (he was on the other side of the house). So I did. But I guess it didn't sound real enough because he didn't think anything of it. Zoe saw the whole thing and went and got him though, and by that time I had a balloon about the size of a small orange on my arm. Josh was sure it was broken, though I was sure it wasn't because I really wasn't in very much pain. 

He wanted to go to the ER. I convinced him to go to an Urgent Care center instead, but we hadn't gone on our latest insurance and we weren't sure which centers were in-network, so we first drove to Springville, then north Orem, before ending up at the Riverwoods, where they told me I should go to the ER. Oh well.

I went to the admitting desk at the ER. The nurse glanced at me and told me to have a seat in the waiting room--that they were busy with some other people. I waited for quite a while. When he finally summoned me and started the paperwork, he saw for the first time the other side of my arm and was startled--he had thought I was coming in for a minor scrape on my elbow. Ha! Urgent care had told me I'd gotten a hematoma--a big sack of blood as a result of having broken a vein and that it would need to be drained. But after an ultrasound and a lot of sitting around in the ER, all they did was wrap an ace bandage around it and tell me to ice it. Apparently it wasn't in a spot that they could drain. It's fun though meeting your entire deductible at the end of the year. Oh well again.

I didn't get a good picture of the worst of it--the ones below are when the lump was much smaller, though the blood had spread to elsewhere in my arm, which looked gross. Today, about two months later, only the smallest slightly hard tissue remains. It's almost gone!