elbow pictures

Back in January, I broke my elbow.  Or rather, the hulking, slow, dope of a fullback on the other team slammed me down after I beat him to the ball, and HE broke my elbow.

I would like to say that what follows is not for the faint of heart, but it appears my non-displaced fracture of the radial head is actually pretty wimpy, as broken elbows go.

First, a graphic I sketched with my own crayons right onto your computer monitor (NO, I did NOT steal it off the googles, thankyouverymuch.  Well, OK, maybe just a little.):

The first thing you can tell from this illustration is that I have very neat penmanship with crayons.  The second thing you'll notice is that the radius makes up 33% of the bones in the elbow.  So breaking it is, you know, painful.

I think this is a view of the elbow from the torso side.  That is, something like the photo below, with x-ray quality images of the bones overlaid in a helpful and illustrative manner (that's the purple part... or maybe more of a periwinkle):

So, what broke in my elbow was the radial head, or the lumpy part at the end of the radius.  Here is one of the x-rays taken during the healing process, with the area of the radial head in the red box.  If you look closely, you can see a pale arc through the bone that should not be there.  That's the non-displaced fracture.  The inset enlargement shows it more clearly.

Do not be alarmed!  That is not blood.

So anyway, the big news today is that the doctor (or, Physician's Assistant, I found out later, but either way she is very cute) says that the bone is now healed.  I can return to getting knocked down on the soccer pitch, lifting heavy objects like full bottles of beer, etc.  I get to return for one final x-ray in two months just to be sure it's all good.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my TMI post for the day.  Thank you for reading.