Fingers & Toes
29 Mar 2018LongDistanceClara
(Short one - and REALLY wanted to put some non-ED piccies in this one but stayed strong! I did manage to wrestle various misbehaving software into submission and managed to get the Chieftain model all sorted out, so will be tinkering with it for some renders at some point. I ended up getting bored waiting for the model to composite so took a few screenies and futzed with them to make the wireframe-y pic at the bottom of this log for fun. Looking forward to sprucing up an already gorgeous ship!
)---
So it turns out - frostbite HURTS!.
Well at least the aftermath does! This might sound a bit silly considering that everything hurts right now, since my body is slowly putting itself back together - my legs are a mess and despite all the medical sorcery the docs here have applied to them, they're incredibly weak and very, very sore ("Gee, ya think? You broke them, shredded almost every muscle and ligament in them and you want to be tap dancing down the corridors?!").
I'm so unbelievably grateful to the staff here (although I suspect my credit account won't be come the end!) and am under no illusions - if I'd gone to A.N.Other station clinicTM, I'd be lying here at best with months of rehab in front of me, at worst with a new nickname ("stumpy" springs to mind!). They've done more than patch me up - they've got me semi-walking within just days of coming in with bones like a jigsaw!
So I can't complain there. Sure it's all pretty painful but it's more like aches and soreness, so that's not too bad. The baaad part are my fingers and toes.
It turns out that if you lie unconscious in a frozen capsule of wreckage on a sub-zero moon for long enough - surprise! You just won yourself a bowl full of frostbite! My fingers and toes had frozen solid and the tips were heavily frostbitten. I'm not going to go into detail but basically after a couple of days - a lot of ouch-and-eww. My fingers were pretty much dead on both hands down to halfway between the palm and the knuckle and it felt REALLY weird.
So a couple of days later, a doc comes in to see me in my room and tells me that they're going to have to do something - specifically, chop my hands off! I think he caught my whole "WOAH back up there sparky, you want to what?!" expression on my face, because he explained that it's just far easier and safer to attach prosthetic hands to a clean healthy forearm. He banged on about it being stronger, less prone to complications and so on - all great points but I was kinda in shock at this point and close to tears!
Daft I know but I thought I was out of the woods (like the idiot I am) and this had blind-sided me a bit. They're SO nice here though; I think he saw how spooked I was about it all, so he explained that they could try to regenerate the tissues, but it would take time, wasn't guaranteed to work and parts of the procedure would be extremely painful.
I wish I'd paid more attention to that last part...
So frady-cat idiot here said "nope, I really want to be 100% human, I'll do anything to stay metal-free please". And later that day, they started doing all these injections and grafts and things which were pretty uncomfortable but not the pain I was dreading. "Thank god I went down this route!" I'm thinking, "this doesn't hurt that bad and I'll have normal fingers and toes and what the hell is that?!".
'Mechanosensory Stimulated Neurogenesis" (or as I prefer to call it Evil-Bastard-Brain-Melting-Torture); basically they put these weird, creepy gloves and socks on me that look kind of innocuous but you just know something bad is about to happen... and then they turn them on ("you may feel a bit of a pinch").
OH MY GOD. I swear it's a good job there were no windows in that room. I'm pretty sure I blew out my larynx with the amount of screaming I did. Here's the fun part about the procedure - you can't be anesthetized. Something to do with how the nerves develop or whatever - all I know is if I had been able to get legible words out I would have been begging them to stop! I know I have a really low threshold for pain but I defy even the most macho rough-and-tumble space badass to go through that procedure without bawling like a baby.
Now here's the really fun part; as they take the stuff off me at the end of the session, they explain over my sobbing that that was just round one. I have to go through it several more times!!! So the next day, I get sat down again and I'm almost audibly whimpering 'cos they're bringing the equipment over again and this time I know what's coming!!!. I've still got a few more rounds of this and I'll be honest I'm starting to wonder - how bad can it be to have prosthetic hands? I mean I'd never need a bottle opener again right? Nope, must stay strong...
There was one little ray of sunshine though. I got a care package from the ship! The guys aren't allowed to visit, but I got a big box full of junk food, a bunch of crap from my bunk, including a favorite t-shirt of mine that someone (I guess Coral) had scrawled on with a bunch of design notes for what the guys want to do to the ship when I'm back on my feet;
I can do this
Just a little longer and we'll all be back together out there getting into all sorts of trouble again - just a week or so more of hell-on-toast and I'll be ready to go - and fingers crossed, I'll be 100% Clara Genuine Article, too