Activity

@anne_the_noob14 Indeed, I am Jonathan, one of many. 🙂

It is possible to set your own arm and make a sling one-handed; setting your arm depends on your tolerance for pain (it’s similar to setting a dislocated joint, with added potential damage to your squishy inner tissues), your knowledge of anatomy, and most importantly, the kind of fracture. Making a sling will depend on one’s creativity and flexibility in using your other limbs or improvised tools to make up for not being able to use the broken arm. Depending on the break, you may still be able to pinch-grip things (somewhat) if you can bear with the extreme pain, but no supporting any weight of more than a few ounces.

Yes, the radius and ulna can be broken separately.

Hmm. A squeeze break? That’s quite a strong grip, to put it lightly (in terms of compression strength, bone is actually superior to solid steel – but much weaker on the tension side); however, that kind of force seems like it would be exerted over a relatively long period of time (compared to say whacking the arm with a hammer; we’re talking seconds vs an instant.) That sort of ‘squeeze until it gives’ seems like it would be more likely to break the thinner ulna, assuming the grip was of human hand size or larger, versus a short but powerful crab claw sort of thing.

Whether or not it also breaks the ulna, a fracture caused by the bone simply being squeezed like a lemon would not be a clean break, but would almost certainly result in what’s called a “comminuted fracture” or a break which results in the bone breaking into three or more pieces; in this case, that would look like a jagged main line break (or two) with several to a dozen micro-fractures, loose chunks of bone of tooth size or smaller, as well as bone particles.

This sort of break would be impossible to fix cleanly without the most skillful surgeon and most cutting edge technology in the world to cut into the arm and literally staple your bones back together and apply traction treatments over the course of months to hopefully grow your arm-bone back into a normal shape. With medieval medicine, if the bone is set like a normal clean transverse / oblique break, the bone is going to grow back either bent out of shape or with a fat lump of scar tissue and in-grown bone where the break is.

Ironically, a twisting or snapping motion is more likely to generate an oblique or transverse fracture of one or both (most likely both) bones, which, while horrifying to watch, will actually be easier to set and is more likely to heal cleanly. The sort of force that can literally just squeeze a bone until it cracks is comparable to being hit by a car.

A sling you could assemble might consist of two to three sticks of about forearm length tied together with bandages, torn cloth, string, or vines, then two long loops made, one at the wrist and one at the elbow, to suspend the sling from the shoulder opposite the fractured arm (so, if you broke your right arm, you’d hang it from the left). As for doing that one-handed: you can single-hand tie a basic loop with just your fingers, even with your non-dominant hand (like half a shoelace knot), then use your teeth to grip one end while you pull it tight on the other end over one end of the stick; loop the free-hanging string several times around that stick, leaving the last loop a little loose; thread the string through that loop and pull it tight. Repeat for each stick, then again at the other end. To keep the sticks at a working height, you could clutch them between your thighs. You will need an extra long loop for each of the shoulder straps, at least a yard, and possibly 2 – 5 times that if you have very thin and/or weak string / vines to work with; however, the tying process will be about the same.

The radius is unfortunately the more critical of your two forearm bones (though both are important); with the fracture of your radius, stability and grip strength in your thumb and pointer & middle fingers is going to be gone; the muscles which pull on your fingers are actually in your wrist, not your fingers, so a fractured radius means it’s going to be excruciatingly painful to hold anything, and nothing short of an adrenaline rush or a lot of morphine is going to dull the pain enough to try and get any use out of that hand.