Okay, I'll start with a cute picture.  Instead of carving pumpkins (I haven't had good luck with knives lately) we decided to paint some.  Tyler picked the theme...Star Wars.  So for Family Home Evening on Monday we all sat down and painted--on the left is Eric's Yoda, mine is in the Darth Vader and Tyler's is the one on the right.  It is a storm trooper.  He did it totally by himself and was pretty proud as I think he should be.  Heck, I'd be scared if I saw something like that coming after me!
Now here's the gross pic of my hand.  Actually it doesn't look too bad in the picture because you can't see all the details.  Basically the incision is about 2" long but it goes (as you can see) across, down, across starting right in between my 2 middle fingers.  The purple is the marker they used to mark where they were going to cut.  Anyway, I'll just give a brief synopsis.  We got the hospital at 10 a.m. where my mom met up with us and took the kids to her house for the weekend.  They got me all prepped then I had to wait a couple of hours (my surgery time was not until noon but they told me to get there 2 hours early).  During that time, a bunch of nurses came and talked to me, Eric was with me of course, and finally the surgeon came in and it was time to get started.  They didn't put me to sleep but they gave me a mild sedative that just made me a little drowsy.  We went into the operating room (which was freezing) and they immediately put up a big blue sheet at my shoulder so I couldn't see what was going on.  They put a tourniquet around my upper arm and strapped my hand into something (remember I couldn't see what it was).  Then they gave me a local shot of anesthetic right into my palm--which hurt like the dickens by the way...   Then I was numb and they went to work.  I could hear them talking but actually had my ipod with me to help tune them out.  I still caught snippets of conversation but it wasn't too bad.  Then after only about 40 minutes they were done, maybe even less.  The prognosis is good--he said on both nerves there was actually still a small amount of the sheath around the nerve still attached so he didn't have to pull them together very much and he expects me to make a full recovery after about 3-4 months (the nerve has to grow back at the rate of 1 inch a month).  The worst part was the tourniquet--it hurt really bad, especially by the end.  It felt like my arm was on fire.  I even had to ask how much longer--but they were almost done by that point.  The nurse told me that most people have to be put to sleep because the tourniquet is so painful.  Luckily my surgery was quicker than most.  They glued the wound shut and put this thick plasticky coating on it to protect it.  I am generally supposed to keep it wrapped and not use it for a couple weeks, but I can move my finger a little bit and I don't have to wear a big splint because the nerves came together so easily.  So it was a success.  Thanks for everyone's support!