Let me share something that happened to me Mudcat....
About 9 years ago, I had a very serious accident with a circular saw (skillsaw type). In a freak occurance, the blade cut into the webbing of my left hand, severing muscle, tendon, ligament, an artery, and nerves. Fortuntely it missed bone, or this story might not have ended well.
As bad as it was, I was surprisingly calm after it happened, and had to direct my wife through her panic to get me to the hospital. The emergency room doc examined my hand and was trying to decide whether to close up the wound, or call in a special*st. I simply told the doctor that I was going to make it easy for him. Call in the special*st. I knew that damage was extensive, and I'm not sure why the emergency room doctor failed to grasp this, but no matter, he acceded to my wishes and called in a special*st.
Purely by the luck of the draw, the special*st on call that day was a plastic surgeon who specialized in hand injuries. All I can say is, God was really looking out for me that day, because this doctor was as good as they get. What even he thought would be about an hour of surgery, turned into 3-1/2 hours. So thorough was he, that he would not close up the wound until he was certain that he had repaired all the damage, and completely cleaned out the excess damaged tissue. As he told me later, he didn't like going back in at a later date to fix what he should have gotten the first time around.
Well, the surgeon had done his part. He gave me a fighting chance at getting the full use of my hand back. Now it was up to me to finish what he started. After the initial healing process had passed, I was assigned to physical therapy to work the hand back into shape. I went through the hand massages, the stretching of the damaged muscle, tendons, and ligaments, and I did the the grip strenghtening exercises. To say that I pushed the limits of what they would allow me to do, is an understatement. I had been an athlete throughout high school and beyond, so I knew how to push through the pain to rehabilitate injuries. I knew that I was responsible for my own success at this point. I watched many of the others in the outpatient rehab while I was there for mine. So many of them acted completely helpless, like it was solely the responsibility of the physical therapist to fix them. That only served to strenghten my resolve.
Now here's the part that relates to this forum and hopefully to you and your problem, Mudcat. I had not been playing guitar much before the accident. I had pared my equipment down to just an accoustic guitar and a couple of harmonicas. But now, faced with the reality that I might not ever play again, rehabbing my hand suddenly became monumentally important. As it's said sometimes, we don't miss something until it's gone.
As I had said earlier, it was my left hand that was injured...my fretting hand. With the muscle that allows for prehensile manipulation that's essential for playing a guitar in question, it was going to be a task to regain the movement that I had, until the accident, taken for granted. Well, rather than doing exercises that would hopefully enable me to eventually play the guitar again, it became the playing of the guitar that enabled full use of my hand again...for everything. There were no exercises that the physical therapist could devise that were anywhere close to those required in fretting and playing a guitar.
Each time I went in for my "treatments" the physical therapist would test the strength of my hand using a gripping device with a scale on it. She was amazed that each time I took this test, my hand was stronger than the last. Not after the treatments, before the treatments. The power of the guitar...
It got to the point of somewhat of a joke between me and the therapist. She almost felt like an observer rather than an active participant in my rehabilitation. It became so much of a joke that one day when I went for my treatment, the therapist said to me; "The doctor wants you to begin aggressive physical therapy starting today. You know, what you've been doing for the last three weeks. He wants you to start that today."
So, what I'm trying to say here in this lengthy essay, Mudcat, is that rather than adopting that doctor's philosophy that you might not play again because of an injury, maybe think of playing as the treatment for the injury.
I can only hope it works for you as it did for me....:AOK:
R :R :greenguitar:
