Rachel Asks:
I love your blog, and I have a fictional medical question for you.
I have a young teen character in the near future (about 2075) who is a motocross racer. She has a horrible crash near the end of her freshman year of college and suffers a large injury – she has to stop school.
I want her to recover in 3-6 months, well enough to go to school, and show up full of plates and wires. I was thinking a severe shoulder fracture would do it, and assuming she got good enough PT, she could eventually race again (and even move onto a more demanding kind of racing.)
Is this a likely enough scenario? What would be a typical range of wires and plates to put in? I want a specific number for her to obsess about as she overcomes her fear of biking. Other injuries you could suggest? What about the recovery timeline? I need her off the bike for about 6-9 months, but some of that could be psychological, not physical recovery.
In this novel, there is some integrated AI technology. Obviously, the answer can incorporate speculative medical advances, but I’d like to know what is typical today so I can make them sound convincing.
Jordyn Says:
My first impression is that the shoulder may not be the best option if you want lots of plates and screws. You have to consider the bones that make up the shoulder and how those injuries would be treated. The scapula is very hard to fracture and likely wouldn’t be repaired that way. I’ve only actually seen one scapula fracture in my entire ICU/ER career in the span of almost 25 years. Collar bones we basically let heal on their own without surgical intervention. Even the upper arm— at least in kids— is not even splinted if you can believe that (most often)! Ligament repairs, labral tear, rotater cuff repairs, etc, could potentially take your time frame (with some complications) but would not involve a lot of plates and screws.
If you wanted to stick with an upper body injury— you could do amputation and then have your character learning to use a prosthetic which might tie in nicely with your integrated AI technology.
If you want to stick with a ton of plates and screws, alternative injuries could be a pelvic fracture or a complex upper or lower (or both) leg fracture. For instance, you could probably Google– x-rays of pelvic fractures repaired using plates and screws or x-rays of lower leg fractures repaired using plates and screws as references to come of with a specific number for her obsessive counting, etc.
Hope this helps and good luck with your story!
Redwood's Medical Edge 