criddell 2 days ago

Great point!

A couple of weeks ago I went over the handlebars on my bicycle and broke my collarbone, needed 5 stitches on my forehead, got a little road rash on my hip, and an avulsion (?) fracture on one finger resulting in mallet finger. I'm 54 and have noticed that I'm healing much more slowly than I remember healing when I was a teenager.

Mostly, things are going smoothly and the only thing I'm really worried about is the mallet finger. I've been told to keep it in a splint for 8 weeks and if I accidentally bend it a little before then any healing will have to start over and I might end up needing surgery for it.

If anybody here has had mallet finger, I'd love to hear how it went for you.

  • flocciput a day ago

    Yep, something I'm realizing is a lot of guidelines/expectations around how long something will take to heal seem to be based on people in the 30-45 range. In your teens and twenties you might get injured and heal faster than expected and think "huh, must be my genes/technique/etc" when really it's probably just youth. Suuuuucks when you start to realize that superpower of yours is fading.

  • ngd 2 days ago

    Sorry to say I'm in almost an identical seat. I broke my thumb and have a gnarly but closed tuft fracture - after 4 weeks I saw a specialist who said there wasn't much healing or bone growth yet, and so decided to do a more aggressive splinting and lock down the whole thumb for another 4 weeks.

    Oddly enough I had a similar injury 10 years prior on a different finger and that healed up in 6 weeks as if nothing ever happened to it.

rodary a day ago

43 at the time.

Probably relevant too – systematic endurance training since 12, elite-level racing since 18 (world champion at that point). So not a stranger to all kinds of injury and what works and what doesn't. For me that is.

  • flocciput a day ago

    Nice! I was gonna say 43 is encouraging to hear, as someone who's worried about how age will affect my proneness to injury/ability to recover, but that's an impressive background and probably a major factor. Guess that's another good reason to stay active.