TBPI: What’s it all about?

I don’t know about you, but until I had my unplanned dismount (ably assisted by an aggregates lorry), I’d never heard of the brachial plexus. I have enough of a vague recollection from doing GCSE Latin to puzzle out that brachial is related to the arm, but that was about the limit of my knowledge regarding this injury. It’s a pretty rare condition, and a surprising amount of the medical staff I encountered in hospital didn’t seem to know that much about it. Until my awesome surgeon came to my bedside to talk to me the first time, I’d been told that I’d have ‘reduced fine motor skills’ and assumed that meant I’d just have a bit of a gammy hand but otherwise would recover. Nearly 3 years on with a more or less completely paralysed arm and the phrase ‘reduced fine motor skills’ still produces a hollow chuckle. As the purpose of this blog (besides being somewhere for me to whinge about my arm) is to hopefully give fellow TBPI sufferers some information, the best place to start is probably by asking: ‘What is a traumatic brachial plexus injury?’

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