Road Rash

I've been having a rough week trying to recover from Friday. I haven't done anything physical all week. The main reason though is this road rash on my arm. It's so weird - concussion, whiplash, large bumps & bruises on my legs (can't see them all in the photo) - they don't seem to be getting me down. I've pretty much gotten over that. But I have this patch of road rash (and frankly I'm lucky it's the only patch I have), which could have actually been worse had I not been wearing arm warmers that day, and it is just so painful that I cannot describe it to you. So today I stayed home from work (yes, it's so painful that I don't want to do anything - particularly put clothing on top of it and it's been cold here this week, so sleeves are a must) and I got to looking up how to treat road rash on-line. Man, Google is just the best for everything, isn't it?!! :)

I am surprised at what I learned, considering this is not my first case of road rash. Seems, though, that last year's rash was either minor, or in spots that were more tolerable pain-wise, and the spots were smaller. So, this is what I learned... The road rash I have on my arm is fairly significant in size, and is a 2nd degree rash (1st being the mildest, 3rd being emergency room material).

Old school way of treating RR is to let it dry out, scab over, potentially crack and hurt a lot, and scar. After putting polysporin on it for a few days over the weekend, primarily because it took the pain away, it wasn't closing up/healing over, so Tuesday I decided to clean it and let it dry out. The past two days I've been in excruciating pain. Every movement hurts. And the dried out, painful spot felt like it was cracking every time I moved my arm. That's what got me to researching this. So I refreshed my memory on something: your skin is filled with nerve fibres (duh! why do you think you can feel so much on it??), and road rash is so painful because now those nerve endings are exposed.

New age treatment for RR is to keep it moist (so what I'd been doing on the weekend wasn't such a bad idea after all). Apparently by keeping it moist and covered the skin grows back (I know - ugh!) without scabbing and it hurts far, far less. Apparently there is less chance of infection this way too - who'd-a-thunk-it? So, I went to the drug store this afternoon and bought this stuff called 'second skin'. There are all kinds of brands, but I think we're a bit limited to what we get here in Canada. So I phoned around before I headed out and found my local, neighbourhood (i.e. independent) pharmacy around the corner had it. Came home, cleaned up the wound again, more polysporin, second skin, and some gauze holding it all together. I'll let you know how it goes. It's supposed to take around 7 days before your skin starts growing back. I'm hoping I've already jump-started that in the past few days, but if the pain just goes away I'll be happy.

And finally: treating the mind. I started to realize today that I need to accept this for what it is. I've been going around trying to pretend that I'm all ok and not in pain but that's not helping anything. I'm not going to (or at least I'll try not to) complain about it, but today I started reminding myself that I do have to accept it, stop resisting it - it is what it is. It's not going to change just because I've decided to ignore it. Not today anyway. And then: this too shall pass. I'll be good as new in no time. Today though: self care. I think I'm doing a good job. I'll be in the big ring again soon enough. :)