questions about hand injury recovery, dead leg, post-rape effects, and complex-PTSD

[pico_the_great]

Hey hey, Lil Details! I gots you another question here:

My character, due to the unfortunate circumstance of having spent a few hours with some truly awful people with a hammer, is now sporting:

1) a broken hand (metacarpals 4 and 5 broken; ring and littel fingers broken at both joints)
2) some kind of quadriceps contusion, and
3) some other

Comments

[tylik]

I've only broken a finger once, and it was pretty minor. A lot of anxiety for me at the time, because I played harp and piano, but... it's gonna hurt, but if she can avoid using the hand, it's just going to be another thing hurting. Possible the worst by night. For me there's a lot I can tune out by day, which is still enough to make it hard to sleep - but then I haven't a lot of talent for sleeping. I have broken metatarsals twice, now, and each time continued walking on them for about a week and a half before doing anything. (Extenuating circumstances, and a kind of ridiculous pain tolerance, especially in those circumstances. Actually, the first one I only dealt with because I was seeing a doctor for something else, and he grabbed my foot during the exam and I kind of squeaked and almost bounced off the ceiling. He told me it was broken, I disagreed, so he poked at it until I decided that maybe he had a point. And the second one mostly because after it didn't clear up after a bit, I kind of recognized it from the first one. I was training every day and teaching the whole time.) I'd tend to tape the hand up well, and the try to arrange for it to receive as little possible jostling as possible (pocket, sling, whatever) and then mostly try to ignore it.

I'd want to know more about the quad contusion, as that leaves a lot of room for different levels of injury. Even a pretty bad one is likely to get better with walking, really. (There are also lineaments that help a lot, but I don't know if such would be available. Some of the die da jiu you can get from Chinese martial arts schools is pretty tops. Healed up the bruising from breaking my cheekbone - not a martial arts related injury - in two days, though the damn thing still ached for a couple of months.) She'll likely limp (though she'd probably do better not to, even if it hurts more) but there are a lot of leg muscles that can compensate.

In terms of injuries from rape, a lot is going to depend on the situation. My guess would be some minor tissue tearing, but not, say, tearing a hole between her vagina and anus - that's far more likely to take an implement, and that would need surgical repair. The rest of it? It will hurt, but it will get better over time. Even pretty simple salves are likely to help (oil mixed with beeswax, that sort of thing). I wouldn't expect it to interfere much with walking, other than adding an additional load of misery.

In terms of PTSD... oy. So much room for individual variation. Like, seriously.

My experience has been that when I'm in the midst of a situation, I focus down and just do what I need to do, and don't unpack the emotional stuff until later.* (Though I'll get pretty surly and want everyone to fucking leave me alone if I'm feeling enough under siege.) Physical pain and active threat raises the levels of response. I will tend to feel more socially isolated that the situation necessarily warrants - and my level of trust for anyone I don't know well goes damn near to zero. For me, I'm unlikely to deal with the more abstract things - recurring dreams, more subtle social effects - until I'm somewhere safe and have a chance to chill. I am likely to be hypersensitive to things that strike me as implied physical threats. A lot of responses tend to get funnelled into anger, and the anger gets funnelled into keeping going. Not really a place I'd want to live, but it's gotten me through some hard places, so I have to respect it as an adaptive response.

[tylik]

You can keep walking through a lot of pain. The injuries you are describing sound to me like things more likely to slow her down a bit than to really make it hard to travel - especially since it sounds like she's really motivated. For me, there's an odd point when I realize that most kinds of pain really don't keep me from putting one foot in front of the other at all. (Broken bones or injuries to the joints of the feet, legs or pelvis are probably the big exceptions, and even then, you can have lesser versions that suck but that don't keep you from moving.)

What kind of gear is she likely to have? How does it compare to the environment she's travelling through? It's amazing how much having the right gear makes so many things tolerable... and not having it can be pure misery. From what you've said, my suspicion would be that the nights are likely to be the worst. It's not easy to sleep rough without good gear in the best of situations, and doing it while hurting is not fun at all. (Heck, the one night I spent wrapped in a cloak, in the rain, under a tree was kind of awful, and I was a teenager and healthy at the time.) It's hard to get warm enough to sleep. Everything hurts. The ground is generally not comfortable, and lumps find all the sore spots. And then eventually you do sleep... and when you wake up it's cold, so getting out from your blankets is no fun, and you're stiff, and probably don't feel rested, and everything sucks. But it gets better after eating and moving, especially if food or drink is hot. (Admittedly, most of my such experiences were in the PNW, and other climates will have their own challenges.)

Oh, and between travel and the needs of healing, she's going to be pretty hungry. I mean, people get through that, too, but bah.

(Reading this, I realize it kind of implies I've had an extremely exciting life. Not really - different experiences over a longish period of time. Mild mannered neurobiologist, martial artist and instructor, zendo resident. Some of these even come with funny stories, at least in retrospect.)

* And this is very broad. I tend to be calm and efficient in emergencies, and then get the shakes some time later.