If you’ve been following along on Instagram stories you may have seen me posting about my elbow. Lately, I have been getting a lot of new followers and questions about what happened and how I am doing, so I thought I’d write a longer post about it all. I hope I answered all of your questions that you submitted, but feel free to reach out or comment on this post if there’s something you still want to know!
Side note: I have included some photos to help tell the story but did my best to make sure they weren’t too gross!
What Happened?
As you know, I absolutely love my bike and went on so many adventures this summer that some might say a little tumble was bound to happen. The short version is back in August 2020 I had a bike crash that shattered my left elbow..
On my way home from work one day, I was biking down a small hill and had gained some speed. While trying to pass someone, they suddenly came to a complete stop without signalling. As I tried to quickly brake, I lost my balance and crashed. The good news was that I only lightly tapped my head, the bad news was that my elbow took the brunt of the fall.
When we got to the emergency room, I got x-rays, which I, as a non-medical professional, don’t think look so bad. Lol. Luckily for me one of my best friends’ dad is a radiologist who guided me in what I was looking at and the different options I had.
Here’s a little recap since I know you’re all curious.
August 10: Right after the accident, I was put into a brace and sent home with some heavy pain killers. To be honest, I think I was in shock. How else to explain a 2-hour walk home at 9pm after a serious accident. But in all fairness, it was a nice warm summer day (I was in shorts and a tank top) and still light out for half of our journey home.
August 13: Three days later, I had a scheduled surgery appointment to insert in metal pins and a metal wire around the fractured bone. I went to the hospital the day before for a pre-op and to meet with the medical team that would be in charge of putting me back together; it was a really smooth experience. While it was a pretty easy and straightforward procedure, I spent the next two nights in the hospital for observation, mostly because I wasn’t able to keep food down (which we later found out was a reaction to the combination of morphine and the antibiotics).
Pre-op 
Post-op
At this point in my recovery, I was feeling really good and positive. I thought I’d be going back to work in a week or two, max. The drugs were working, I was happy, and so Jesper took me to dinner at my favorite Chinese restaurant. We walked since the weather was nice and got mocktails since I couldn’t drink on the pain meds. Plus my new brace matched a pair of my sandals, so everything was good, right?
This is where things get a bit blurry in my memory. For a while, I did feel I was healing for the most part. At least I thought so. I’m not sure if it’s getting medical treatment in a foreign country or if I just hadn’t asked the right questions, but I felt I wasn’t sure what was “normal healing”. Elbow injuries are not very common unless you’ve been injured from playing tennis, so most articles were very specific to those types of injuries and not helpful to me.
For the next two weeks, I was feeling somewhat okay with a few bumps in the road. I had a 24-hour visit at one point to the hospital, again for nausea from the pain medicine and antibiotics, but I also had a 24-hour period where I felt amazing and even met friends for a couple of beers. It really did seem like things were going smoothly and all my post-op appointments went quite well. I stopped the antibiotics after the initial seven or ten days post-op, which is pretty standard.
August 28-30: At this point, I wasn’t sure if something was wrong with my arm. It was red, hot, and swollen yet I had no fever. Because I didn’t have a fever and the incision at this point still looked okay, the doctors thought everything was fine. By the end of August, I was calling the doctor’s office every day asking questions about whether or not I should come in. Due to COVID, they were more reluctant to see patients, so I was given phone consultations.
August 31-Sept 8: Now my arm is red, hot, the pain is increasing each day, and the incision is beginning to open. In Denmark you can only call your doctor Monday-Friday between 8:00 and 8:30 each morning (for most practices) to get a same day “acute” appointment, so I was first or second in line each morning. The receptionist basically knew my name before I said hello. My GP is so sweet and everyone at the practice was so kind. Now that my arm had become much more severe, I was allowed to go into the office as the doctors had become a bit concerned. Every other day I would go into the office, which is located near Nyhavn so I’d take a scenic tour along the harbor, lifting my mood. At the office they would examine the wound, check my infection levels, and send me on my way.
Towards September 4-5, they started giving me bandages and at one point even sent me to the ER for further scans (though long story short, the ER just gave me morphine and sent me home). Around this time they also started me on a new set of antibiotics, which should have probably been started much sooner. In the medical team’s defense, I never had a fever and my infection levels weren’t registering as bacterial yet, which are normally two key signs to an infection. What they overlooked or misunderstood due to language barriers, was the fact that my blood sugars (I’m also a type 1 diabetic) were insanely high for no reason, which is a key sign of infection.
My arm at this point looked much worse, but you can start to see the swelling here. I’ll spare you the others. 
Eventually on September 8, I had an appointment at the doctor’s to get a pap smear and asked if she could look at my elbow while I was there. At this point it was so painful and looked sickening. (My mom must have a strong stomach after seeing all the photos I sent her. ) Normally the doctor’s office probably wouldn’t have taken a look but since I was such a regular at this point they did and immediately sent me to the ER. My godsend mother-in-law had come into town the day before to help me out as I was feeling super homesick, missing my own mom, and just generally feeling unable to do much. The two of us then headed to the ER.
This is where my treatment really got serious. I was also given a new, younger medical team that was truly awesome. The surgery department explained everything to me so well and also expressed how serious the situation had become. The infection was quite close to infecting my bone, which can be super consequential. They explained to me I needed another surgery first thing the next morning to remove all of the infection as well as two weeks of intense IV antibiotic treatments, four times a day.
My heart sort of sunk. I think deep down knew it was coming, but I had been trying to stay so optimistic that I actually believed maybe they could prescribe some pills and release me back home. I cried a lot. Both because I was scared, but also because I was really sad that I needed another surgery and this intense IV treatment. Even though the doctors had explained everything very clearly, I still felt overwhelmed by all the information and wasn’t feeling well so my comprehension was not at its top level.
September 9: This is the start of my two-week journey at the hospital. It doesn’t sound so long, but it surely felt this way. I am very thankful that it was an arm and not a leg as I enjoyed going on lots of walks through the halls between each of my three meals. Being in the orthopedic unit, most patients were not there long term so the staff quickly knew who I was and sometimes seemed surprised I was still there. In the beginning they kept saying oh will you leave today, you look great but soon they realized that was not the case, which I was happy about since the comment sometimes brought me to tears. I was also by far the youngest in the ward, often by 40+ years. I go into more details below about COVID and being hospitalized at this time, but it was quite difficult by the end of my stay to be positive and not go crazy. I am so incredibly grateful for my office, friends, and family who sent cards, flowers, and snacks.
I even got a hair cut at the hospital! 
Two weeks later, I got to go home, but the infection levels weren’t yet low enough so I needed a few weeks of antibiotics (in pill form) and a third operation to take out the metal pins. The reason for this is that the infection lies on the metal, creating something called biofilm. This film is nearly impossible to remove and any slight infection can quickly multiply. If my infection levels had been lower after the IV treatments, I may have been able to avoid the third operation but the infection could have also come back at any time. Even years later.
Between the two operations for the most part I felt quite okay. I felt drained from fighting the infection but compared to the time between operations one and two I felt signifcantally better.
November 19: The third, and thankfully the last, surgery couldn’t be until three months after my initial surgery as I had to wait for the bone to heal. before they could take out the metal pins and wire. Luckily that surgery went well (it only took 24 minutes, isn’t that crazy!?) except for the fact that I actually woke up briefly during the operation due to a failed IV (I have a history of difficult veins). Crazy I know! Fortunately, I do not remember anything but a team of doctors did come and consult me about possible PTSD symptoms or nightmares that I could possibly develop from the episode.
Again, my infection levels were still not as low as they had originally hoped so I was to continue my antibiotics (pill form) four times a day, for six more weeks.
January 4: I stopped taking antibiotics!
January 15: 10 days after I stopped taking the antibiotics, I got blood work done to test my infection levels and I am very happy to report that they came back “so low, we almost couldn’t count them” as the doctor said in her phone call. The last appointment was a bit bitter sweet. I had gotten to know my medical team quite personally so naturally it was sad to say farewell, but I’m over the moon the damn infection is gone.
It will still take up to two years for my arm to fully heal in terms of scar tissue and some days it’s still quite uncomfortable but it’s usually just temporary.
What was the recovery process like?
Long and draining, but I am happy to report that I am on the other side of things now.
Have you ever injured your finger and then realized how vital that finger was for doing basic life activities? Well, that was me but with my arm. At first, I couldn’t even shower or change my clothes by myself (thank you Jesper). I can’t imagine what it would be like to have lived alone. For weeks, I also couldn’t put my hair up on the top of my head and quickly learned Jesper was just as terrible (Sorry babe).
I was on antibiotics four times a day, for a total of three and half months. While for the most part I do not believe I suffered any severe side effects, I do believe it was very hard on my body to fight the infection, causing me fatigue. Also the thing about antibiotics is that you can not eat one hour before you take them or two hours afterwards, which at first was really difficult to get used to. It was also really hard socially to make plans with people as I needed to eat within a very tight time frame.
The withdrawals of morphine were also horrendous. I’m talking insomnia, heat flashes, extreme pain from now having no painkillers, etc. It was so bad that I really wanted to resist taking them after the second and third operations. I also had a terrible reaction when taking morphine with the antibiotics, causing me to vomit endlessly for hours and hours on end. It was not pretty.
I am incredibly grateful for my support bubble here in Denmark. I couldn’t have gotten through this in a foregin country without you.
How did COVID Impact it? What about the Danish health care system?
Let’s start with COVID. As my arm rode the roller coaster so did COVID. At times it didn’t affect anything, meaning Jesper could come with me to the appointments. Once I was admitted to the hospital for that two-week period, the corona numbers in Denmark started to rise and which meant Jesper slowly was less allowed to visit. At the start, he was allowed for as long as possible. Then I could only have guests for one hour (multiple guests okay). Soon it became one guest for one hour, and by the end of my two-week stay, there were no visitors allowed in the ward. This meant we could go on walks in the public hallways. Luckily it was still somewhat warm enough outside so Jesper brought dinner for a “date night” one evening.
At the end, I was definitely feeling quite lonely. My heart goes out to anyone who has spent an extended period of time at the hospital during this time. I was super fortunate to have this amazing “roommate” for one of my weeks. I’ll call her V. She was the same age as my grandma and we just talked and talked. I didn’t even realize how much I enjoyed her presence until the day she left. My favorite night was one where we went through some of my old family photos from when my dad was a little boy in Denmark and hearing her parallel stories.
A lot of you asked me about what the Danish health care system is like. While this warrants its own post, I’ll briefly sum up some of the benefits and downsides that I experienced specifically relating to this experience. Overall, I am incredibly grateful for the system. This ordeal cost me zero as I am a legal resident who pays taxes. However, because we are a welfare state I sometimes feel treatment is a bit reactive and not proactive and sometimes they don’t do as much testing as they typically do (from my experience) in the US.
How are you now? Can you use your arm like normal?
I am doing okay! I can use my elbow as normal though I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that my arm felt as it did before the accident. It will never feel like an uninjured elbow. It’s still uncomfortable, some days more than others, but technically speaking I should and can do anything I could do before as the bone is now fully healed.
Scars?
Oh yes! It’s about 5 inches (12.7 cm) long and pretty badass looking. Luckily, I don’t really see it myself since it’s on the back of my arm so it doesn’t bother me at all. If anything, it tells a story. It should also fade over time. Even though I had three operations, I only have one scar —my surgeon said I have a bit of an “elbow lift” and will have a nice and tight elbow when I’m older. It made me giggle.
Are you afraid to bike again? Are you biking again?
Yes and no. To be honest, even though I told everyone I wasn’t afraid to get back on my bike, I was really anxious and afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it without fearing that I would fall again. However, I am over the moon to report that I am up and running full speed ahead like nothing ever happened. I do have moments where I can feel my anxiety creep in, especially when I have to pass someone, and I have been a bit more wary of biking in the dark or rain (even though my accident happened in bright sunshine and broad daylight).
I hope you enjoyed it and you seriously get a medal if you made it all the way to the end. If there is anything else you want to know, don’t hesitate to comment or DM me.
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