Got a second opinion on my mangled left middle finger this morning. The last guy had said there was a good chance I would never be able to fully extend it. And once he found out I was right handed, he gave me a look like "Oh, okay, so what's the big deal!?!" Then he left the room and had the high-school age girl assistant splint it up, and only bothered to look it over when I protested.
I bet Jimmy Page's doctor showed a little bit more concern several weeks back.
Anyway, the guy I saw today is a hand surgeon named Steven Shin, who has previously attended to a number of professional athletes. He listened to my sob story, looked over my X-rays, unsplinted me, probed it thoroughly, had me try bending it slightly, took some new X-rays, examined them closely, and informed me that I was very lucky in the way the fingerbone had begun to re-fuse over the ten days since I had been splinted. He said he might have tried surgery if I had come in right away, but that if it were his injury, he would be ecstatic that the joint could be straightened so well at this point.
I'll take some credit for fine tuning the splint rigging and manipulating the bone fragment. I nearly worried myself into a heart attack, fiddling with that thing every hour of the day.
Then he gave me a much more comfortable splint for the top of my finger, instead of the one on the bottom bending it slightly backwards. "Come back in three weeks," he ordered.
Bottom line: Dr. Shin says I will have no problem playing the guitar (he plays the violin, I think). Okay, so I will have a noticeable lump on the back of my joint. And there is a chance I won't be able to hyperextend the joint the way I could before. Which does "bug," but honestly I can't make a rational argument to support the notion that my playing would be affected.
Phew.
In the meantime, I've started building up some piano skills.
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