Fractured Humerus - Recovery Time?

[krkesting]

Took a spill and suffered a non-displaced spiral fracture w/ butterfly fragment to the distal (bottom) third of my left humerus 9 days ago. The bad news is that the timing was terrible, as I was supposed to be taking a "guys" trip to Revelstoke this week. As you can probably imagine, I'm incredibly bummed out. The good news is that I'm right handed and also that my orthopedic surgeon felt that surgery wouldn't be necessary.

9 days out from the date of the injury - I've been fitted with an upper arm brace, and I can let my arm hang at my side without much discomfort. My orthopedic surgeon informed me that the sooner I could get out of the sling, and start lightly moving my elbow, the better off I would be in terms of recovering my range of motion. I'm still very swollen, and I tend to get some discomfort while sleeping, but at this point I'm not taking any pain med's. The worst part of this whole situation is seeing the awesome pictures my buddies have been posting from Revelstoke the past 2 days! Fortunately though, the arm seems to get a little better each day, albeit slowly.

Ultimately, I'm curious if anyone on the forum has any experience with a similar injury, and what the recovery time is like? (aka - when can I ski again? haha...)

Thanks for the help guys!

[ashland]

Relatively speaking it sounds as if you're not too bad off. If you're already seeing improvement that's great. Do as your ortho says and get out of the sling as soon as possible. I can empathize with you, and missing out on good skiing. When I fractured my humerus it was pretty bad. I was certainly on pain med's and watcher my brother come home each day during the best winter in 25 years. That was 8 years ago. I was 30 years old without insurance so I didn't have the surgery and let time heal it. Well, it took 10 months to heal. Good luck and stay positive.

[STLHD]

I broke mine eight years ago. Mine was non-spiral, so not sure how comparable my recovery time was to yours. From what I remember, I broke the arm in late Feb and it took me about a month before I could really move the arm. By late April I was doing PT and by the summer I was back working on fishing boats.

[kmkmkmk]

I broke mine in 2007. Took about a month to heal. but I didn't move my arm enough and my shoulder froze up, which required "manipulation" under anesthesia to get it moving again. recovery from that was another month.

[cat in january]

Broke the radial head off in a fall a while back. Doctor offered to cast or sling-I jumped at the sling. Was not winter, so a bit hard to judge how skiing would have treated it. Sling was on for 3-4 weeks and it seemed it was mostly back a bit after that, but fully back took over a year-think there was some tendon damage too, but no MRI. That elbow is a lot bigger now.