Karen Harris is a young woman who narrowly escapes death on the freeway. She needs more surgery to fix her arm.
Karen was scheduled for surgery. When she was aware of being in the room after the surgery she saw her arm was bandaged much like it was before the first surgery. She asked the nurse about the outcome and she told her the doctor would be in to see her.
Dr. Patel came in about an hour later. They located a problem. A piece of the bullet had traveled up her arm, through the area the nerves and artery occupied in the upper arm and exited through a hole made by another bullet. There was no indication of the damage on the x-rays or MRI, they located the problem on the ultrasound of the artery and the surgery revealed the damage. They replaced the artery with a artificial graft. A long section of the nerve was gone. There was a surgery that could fix that, a nerve graft. It would require another surgery and the time till the nerve would recover could be years.
Again Dr. Ansil counseled against additional surgery for at least a month.
The nerve graft was performed. Two weeks after the surgery Karen’s arm was red and inflamed in the area of the graft. She was taken back to surgery and it was removed. By now the splint and bandage on her elbow, wrist and forearm were removed. She had one massive group of scars and a terribly misshapen hand. Her wrist and fingers were limp and hung down unless she had on the sling to support it.
Her lawyer applied for victim’s assistance money and they allocated money for surgery to restore her hand. Two months later she spent over five hours in the OR. Orthopedic and cosmetic procedures were performed to correct the shape and scarring of her hand and remove some of the metal in her wrist. A second nerve graft was performed at the end of this procedure. This time within a week her body rejected the graft and it had to be removed. During the next couple weeks she endured several bouts of inflammation and infection in the area around her artificial elbow and the reconstructed wrist. She was on medication continually including high doses of Prednisone. Her mood sings were terrible. Her face got puffy. Karen had rarely taken any medications. Now she felt like a junkie.
Karen: Chapter One – The Attack
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