Not A Blog™

Except for my appointment on Friday, this was a pretty uneventful week. I was still on bed rest up through this weekend, so I didn’t do a lot last week except lay around, hurt, and sleep. In fact, I slept quite a bit, sometimes as much as sixteen hours a day. I think this was a combination of the painkillers, and my body working hard to repair itself. Either way, sleeping was about the best thing I could do because it helped the time pass without being conscious of the pain.

Fortunately I am in much less pain now than I was this time last week. The sharp pain and throbbing is mostly reduced to a dull ache deep in the bones, but I’m able to mediate this pretty well without using too much medication. Considering all the hardware that they installed, I’m actually surprised it doesn’t hurt more.

On Friday I had my follow up appointment with the doctor and got a chance to find out some details about the surgery that I didn’t get last week. I had a plate and seven screws installed. The largest screw, called the syndesmodic screw, is about two and a half inches long and goes through the widest part of the ankle. This is the screw that I’ll need to have removed during a second surgery, since it’s not designed to carry weight, and could break if I walk on the foot while it’s still in the bones.

The doctor said that when they opened up my leg, they discovered the injury was actually a lot worse than even the X-rays indicated. Aside from extensive tendon damage, the fibula had also cracked up the center, making the bone a lot weaker than they had anticipated. A free screw was put in first to stabilize the bone before the plate and the rest of the screws were installed. The doctor said it is pretty much the worst case scenario for this type of injury, and that it was one of the worst he’d ever seen.

At the appointment, I had the stitches removed and received my permanent cast. Now it’s just a matter of waiting. Lots of waiting. The doctor revised his estimate of four to six weeks to a full eight week recovery period based on how extensive the injury was. I’m still hoping to do better than this, though.

Getting the cast put on turned out to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated. After the surgery, they had set my foot in the splint at about a 45 degree angle. In the permanent cast, my foot had to be at 90 degrees. That had to have been the longest 45 degrees of my life. My foot was already stiff from not moving it for three weeks, and of course on top of that I had all the screws in there. It was excruciating, trying to get it to move. Then to add insult to injury, the nurses actually brought out a protractor to measure the angle of my foot, helpfully pointing out to me that with my foot at 87 degrees I still had 3 degrees to go.

I don’t think this bodes well for the physical therapy portion of my recovery. I was under the impression that physical therapy would be no big deal–just move your foot around a little bit, maybe flex the toes, okay done. But if it hurts that much to move my foot after three weeks of inactivity (with a recent surgery, granted), I think this physical therapy business is going to be a lot more difficult than I originally assumed.

But that’s still a few weeks away yet. In the meantime, I’ve begun the process to get myself out of this base. It’s actually not a bad base as bases go, it’s just not set up as a med hold station. Everything you need on post is within walking distance of everything else–which is awesome if you can walk.

NMPS Medical doesn’t want me here any more than I want to be here, and for a number of reasons. If something happens to me in my room–even if I’m able to call someone–it would still be a good five minutes before anyone could get to me, and that’s just not a good situation to be in. I don’t necessarily need to be in a hospital, but I should probably be in a hospice environment where there are people checking in on me periodically. (Something which nobody really does now, at least not with any regularity.)

I got a copy of my records and Monday I’m going to be meeting with NMPS Medical to put together my medical board. That package will get forwarded to Norfolk and the doctors there will make the decision of where to transfer me. I think the transfer is likely to happen since I need a second surgery and a significant amount of physical therapy afterwards and because, as I mentioned, Gulfport is not a med hold station. It will probably take one to two weeks for the resulting order modification to come through, in which case I will once again be flying on a commercial airline with a broken leg–though hopefully for the last time.

Now there’s nothing for me to do but wait: the long, painful process of a broken bone healing.

-Ted