Making Rounds
Relief after a broken wrist and two years of pain
Anita Higgins was visiting a friend in Maryland when she took a tumble that would haunt the next two years of her life.
“I was at my friend’s church,” she said. “I was inviting some people to use sanitizer and trying to give them some room. I stepped back, and I stepped back again, and the third time I stepped back, I ended up falling down steps.”
By the time she was back on her feet, she knew there was something seriously wrong with her left wrist. A stop at the nearest emergency room showed multiple fractures in the bones that connect the hand to the forearm. They gave her some painkillers and the name of a nearby surgeon, but she had to get back to North Carolina.
After bringing her swollen hand back home, she had surgery in which hardware was placed to stabilize the bones so they could heal. But the hardware seemed to be causing its own problem.
“It was hitting the nerve, and I was just in terrible pain,” Anita said. “I went back to the doctor and said I just could not take the pain anymore. So, they decided to go in the following week and take the hardware out. And that gave me some relief.”
But her hand was still not healed, and it was affecting her whole life. She even changed career paths, leaving a lifelong career in the beauty industry because it required full use of both hands all day.
“I had to cut my own hair as short as possible,” she said. “I couldn’t shampoo it. I couldn’t brush it. I couldn’t do anything.”
Finally, a visit to her primary care doctor presented a new option.
“She said, ‘Why don’t you go see Dr. Levine?’ She said he specializes in injuries like this. So, I called him and made an appointment.”
Benjamin Levine, MD, is an orthopedist at Valley Orthopedics & Sports Medicine. All orthopedists specialize in treating the musculoskeletal system, but Dr. Levine’s subspecialty is in surgery of the upper extremities: the shoulders, elbows, wrists and hands.
“There’s more subtle things you do in hand surgery,” Dr. Levine said. “Hand surgeons do a lot of tendon repairs, soft tissue reconstruction, nerve repairs, nerve decompressions. A lot of orthopedists do these, but some of the more complicated ones are left to the hand surgeons.”
He chose this subspecialty 25 years ago, in part because it requires not just intensive skill but also creative problem-solving. And he’s especially proud of the enormous difference it makes for patients.
“It’s returning them to the things they miss doing,” Dr. Levine said. “Helping them get back to working, playing and enjoying their families.”
On her very first visit to his office, Higgins knew she was in the right place.
“Everybody was so friendly,” she said. “One thing I really loved was that when he would leave the room, or when the nurses would leave the room, they didn’t close the door. So, you didn’t feel like you were locked away. You see people walking up and down the hall, and they all say, ‘Hello, good morning.’ It’s just a very welcoming place.”
They discussed the possibility of surgery down the road, but the first priority was getting her pain under control. Higgins says a shot of cortisone changed things almost immediately.
“It relieved the pain within a few hours,” she said. “This was after two years of pain. It made everything so much easier. I might need to go back in a couple of months, or a couple of times a year, but this is the best I’ve felt in two years.”
Dr. Levine says it’s not unusual to put surgery on the back burner when a faster, less invasive move might do the trick.
“Surgery should always be a last resort for some things,” he said. “There are various treatments we can do once we’ve found what’s causing the pain.”
Higgins is now a full-time student at Fayetteville Technical Community College, planning a new career in hospitality. She hopes her story will help raise awareness that there is specialized help available for injuries like hers, and that anyone in a similar predicament will find Dr. Levine more quickly than she did.
“He really and truly cares about what he is doing,” she said. “It’s made such a difference for me.”
For more information about orthopedics at Cape Fear Valley Health, visit capefearvalley.com/ortho.
