User Profile

Hi Everyone!

My name is James and I am from Chicago.

This past summer, I injured my wrist while at the gym. Never having broken a bone in my body before, I just assumed that it was a really bad sprain and never suspected any worse. For the next several months, I continued my activities more or less as usual, while doing my best to avoid most activities that put a heavy strain on my wrist due to the pain it produced. Many months after the injury, the pain still hadn't significantly improved. I finally decided to revisit the doctor, who instructed me to take an X-Ray, then proceeded to show me the clear break right down the middle of my scaphoid bone. Needless to say, I was quite surprised as I did not even consider the obvious this entire time. After my Orthopedic surgeon recommended surgery that would put a metal screw in my wrist, I went online and researched as much as I possibly could about the injury and also about the surgery. What I found was there was a great deal of information online about scaphoid bone injury and surgery, but not all of it was written with the patient in mind. I waded through a ton of sometimes repetitive, sometimes technical, and sometimes irrelevant information just to learn what I wanted to know as a patient, which a lot of times is quite different from what a doctor or surgeon wanted to know. I also sought out fellow bloggers who had written about their scaphoid surgical experiences recently, who proved to be a great source of experience and knowledge. In the end, largely thanks to my newly made blogger friends, I felt a lot more comfortable and informed. After consulting with my surgeon again with this new information, I felt confident that I had enough knowledge to make a proper decision. I decided to temporarily put off surgery and get a cast on for several reasons: it had already been many months since the injury, so a few months more in a cast don't pose significant marginal risk exposure in my particular case; I was an active person who enjoyed casual sports, and in the months following the injury this did not change much, so I never gave my wrist a good chance to heal; those were the two biggest reasons amongst the rest. So far healing progress has been reasonably well. In two weeks, my cast will come off and I will find out for sure if I will have to go through surgery - something I am very anxious about.

I thought to myself, if this is how concerned I got because of a possible wrist surgery, what about those who were about to go through something far more involved? Won't they face the similar but much bigger challenges than I did? How will they find the information they need? How will they find a very valuable resource, each other, so they can share experiences and tips? How will they find similar people to form a supportive community with each other? How will they learn to cope with things post-surgery? So I decided to start the project Wikipatients to help patients help each other. It uses wiki to allow any reader to also become an editor, just like Wikipedia does. The project has forums to compliment the wiki, which is also suitable for patients who are less familiar with wiki technology. However, due to the nature of wikis, forums, and online communities in general, there must be enough people in the beginning to help it reach a critical mass. So I again reach out to the blogger community for assistance, and invite bloggers who are already writing about their experiences to share their knowledge in a centralized community designed to help other patients.

So if I added you as a friend, you are one of the invitees. I did my best to ensure that I found the right people (to be more specific, people who have blogged about their surgery in the past 6 months) - so if you are not about to have surgery or did not have surgery recently, and so did not want to hear about this, then I do give you my apologies. If you would like, you can drop me a comment and I will investigate it to make sure other similar mistakes won't be made in the future. For everyone else, Please help knowledge grow by visiting Wikipatients. Thank you for taking your time to read this, and have a very nice day.

Clarification: since I confused some people I wanted to point out that Wikipatients is not limited to sports injuries or surgeries, it's a site that aims to be helpful for all patients, or ex-patients - surgeries, medical conditions, illnesses, all are relevant. Sorry about the confusion.

-James

PS. Add me as a friend if you'd like, I plan to keep you guys posted on my progress with the injury and with the site.