Backstory 1: Reconstructed Memories

As of the moment, still no exciting new developments as I continue progressing to my encounter with the Taylor Spatial Frame. I'm still trying to figure out what academic expectations I'll need to fulfill post-op, still trying to figure out just what the problem with my ankle happens to be (the current leading hypothesis: the ankle is stressed because I favor that leg, seeing as the other one is mildly crooked). I remain fairly relaxed about the procedure. I think a lot of this calmness can be traced to my having roughly zero conception of just what, exactly, wearing a Taylor Spatial Frame feels like, what it entails, what it means.

Other than having a straight leg, that is.

For a week or two I've been meaning to start writing down my backstory, my previous history with legs, osteochondromas and surgeries, figuring that it would be helpful for me and perhaps interesting to know given the general purpose of this blog.

Hence, today's inaugural backstory entry.

RECONSTRUCTED MEMORIES

I had my first surgery in the winter of 2004 when I was nine years old, which is to say, these issues with my legs have been prevalent in my life for a while now. Supposedly, when I was very young, I ran around outside all the time. When my family lived in Virginia, we had a wonderful large yard, complete with several freestanding stone sheds and a gorgeous magnolia tree perfect for climbing. I can remember the yard very well.

I cannot, however, remember pending all my time outside. I have a smattering of memories from that time: an isolated incidence of standing on a Minnesota parking lot, free of context, a small dirty-white dog leaping up to bite my uncle's hand, our larger dogs staring into the house from the porch, me lying on the floor with a marker in my hand, creating construction paper books. But not of running.

My parents say that when we visited people's houses I would run around outside and ask to see their gardens. I have manufactured memories of this, probable images informed by these stories but with no grounding in concrete remembered images.

My surgeon in Virginia had his office in a low-lying building called KCRC: the Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center, ran by the University of Virginia. The waiting room at KCRC was a wonderful thing. They had piles and piles of magazines to peruse, a row of computers to play on, and, most impressive of all, a large room with enormous windows stocked with everything I adored: a plastic climbing-castle, coloring supplies, a table covered in Thomas trains.

I remember climbing in that castle very well, pretending with my brothers that we lived in the medieval ages while for the most part ignoring the other children, sliding down the anachronistic yellow slide emerging from the side of the structure.

I remember my first orthopedic doctor considerably less well. When I was three, my parents noticed a suspicious lump beneath my knee. Fearing the worst, I was taken in to the doctor's and diagnosed with multiple osteochondromas, a disease I inherited from my mother (the immediate blame, as with many immediate blames, went to my father though eventual testing revealed my mother to be the culprit in passing down my condition). In short, I've been meeting with doctors about the condition for a while now.

The first doctor, if my memory serves, was an old man with white hair. As my mother has remarked many times, he was very apprehensive about operating on me.

Eventually, he left UVa and KCRC and I wound up with a new orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Mark Abel (who was utterly fantastic). My first appointment with Dr. Abel, he suggested operating. My mother left, taking me with.

When we returned, he was less gung-ho about putting me under the knife.

I can't remember exactly how long it took between when Dr. Abel first talked about operating on me and when I was actually operated on. I want to say that it wasn't very long, but to tell the truth, I have no idea. What I've written is entirely reconstruction, a melding together of the stories I've heard from my mother.

I do remember that I was not scared of that first surgery. I had no ability to comprehend what it would entail. It was fun, exciting, a mystery—just think, I'd be the only kid in my grade to have had surgery!

I remember quite clearly sitting on the arm of our big green chair in the library, leg swinging, music playing in the background, very calm, ready to go on the morning of that first surgery.

One Month Remaining

One month from today, I will have major, life-altering orthopedic surgery involving a stay at the hospital lasting multiple days, a stint in the wheelchair, months of struggling with stairs and perhaps the world's least attractive medical device. I feel really quite calm about it, much more so than I did a month ago. Then, I felt like the entire world was piling up and I was trapped beneath a massive wave, an accumulation of detritus and objectives and future stressors.

But now?

Now I'm sitting on my bed in loose-fitting jeans and a comfortable t-shirt. My legs are crossed in front of me. I'm breathing easily. Outside, temperatures have plunged into the realm of uncomfortable (even when one is armed with warm jackets and scarves). But inside four solid walls, I'm really quite comfortable, thank you very much.

Perhaps this calmness is because said procedure will provide a cure to one of my current afflictions. My right ankle currently exists in a perpetual state of twistedness. Most of this twistedness seems to come from my leaping around on stairs like a lunatic. Yesterday, however, I was standing on the stairs. I was not moving. And…the ankle twisted. I'm fairly certain that the geometry of the leg leads to problems with the ankle (the interior of my right shoe is built up to help keep the foot happy). With my friend the frame, the geometry of the leg will be fixed. Hence, no more ankle twisting.

Perhaps this calmness is because I just received hopeful tidings regarding life immediately post-frame. One of my friends' mother recently broke her leg, shattering her tibia and fibula (from what I understand) and had a frame put on. On Monday, the frame was taken off. Apparently life immediately post-frame is somewhat straightforward to adjust to. This bodes well.

Or perhaps this calmness is simply because I just spent five days lounging around the house, trying to chill out. It's telling that my major accomplishment over Thanksgiving was finishing The Stand (1400 pages later and, despite the book very clearly ending, I've spent enough time reading it that I'm not fully convinced I actually turned the last page). Which is to say, I'm rested now.

There are still unknowns ahead. The pre-op appointment has yet to be scheduled. Despite doing my best to read up on how it feels to have your leg impaled by a Taylor Spatial Frame, I'm not really prepared for such an occurrence. I struggle with the idea of being unable to walk.

But…again, I'm calm.

Will the experience be interesting? Undoubtedly. But I should also survive, fairly easily, to tell the tale. And, in the end, my leg will be straighter.

And, hopefully, my ankle will have escaped its current state of perpetual twistedness.

Thanksgiving

Well, today is Thanksgiving, which means I've spent a solid amount of time putting together felt turkey kits from Target. I haven't been any help, dinner-wise, though. This is probably a good thing, as evidenced by the following conversation:

Me: How do you tell the difference between a sweet potato and a potato? You know, with the skin still on?
My mother (holding a sweet potato): Well, these are red and potatoes are brown…
Me (looking at the decisively red potato-object): That would be a fairly easy way to tell.

I did, however, manage to find a reasonably sized turkey at the grocery store and helped taste-test a few appetizers. So some accomplishments, albeit not dealing with actual skills involving food. Apparently at some point before I head off to college in the fall I will be learning how to cook some basic meals. My current food repertoire more or less starts at cereal + milk = breakfast and ends at bread + stuff + more bread = sandwich.

Other activities from today include playing chess with a brother (he made me play to show off his fancy opening-of-the-game strategy which turns out to be an open-the-game-and-end-it-too strategy), playing with the piano, pretending that I'll get some reading done at some point, scrubbing a pot (singular), taking some of the dogs for a walk.

It was a rather interesting walk. We have a tight little loop through the neighborhood and the nearby rose garden we like to take. About halfway through said walk, I decided to let one of the dogs, Charlotte, take the lead. Charlotte completed the loop. Unfortunately, it was a mostly-completion. Charlotte completely missed the turn into the alley our house is on. She then proceeded to wander through the neighborhood and we wound up multiple blocks away from our end destination. She was still going strong when a mutual consensus was made between us humans (us humans here being me and my brother) to head on home. Unlike Charlotte the Shetland Sheepdog, we chose a straight, direct route home. My leg was giving up. I could feel some shards of crookedness.

Now that I'm home and have had some Thanksgiving dinner, with my traditional minimalistic amount of turkey meat and solid heapings of some of the cornerstones of Southern cooking, such as butter, sugar and pecans, I feel much better.

But, of course, the point of this post is not really to comment on the relatively small number of things I have managed to do today. Really, I thought it would be nice to write a little list of things I'm thankful for.

I'm thankful for family and for friends for for everybody who has been supportive. I'm thankful for dogs, those with a sense of direction and those without. I'm thankful for medical technology and a body which is in better shape now because of surgery than it would be without. I'm thankful for the ability to get up in the morning and walk. I'm thankful for contact lenses, which are wonderful things once you get them in your eyes. I'm thankful for snow, which makes the whole world sparkle. I'm thankful for music, for stories, for enjoyment, for laughter.

And despite my fear, I'm thankful for the Taylor Spatial Frame. I don't have it on yet and I suspect it will not be my best friend, but what I'm really thankful for is the knowledge that I'll be able to have an active future. A future where I can walk and move and be me.

That's what's been running through my head, more or less, this Thanksgiving.

Regarding Breaks

It seems at this point my existence is becoming a long trudge of schoolwork (homework and tests and the like) punctuated by brief breaks. Probably a bit of an exaggeration, but still…it is wonderful to be off of school, even if only for half a week, even with the knowledge that my next break, in about a month, will probably not be super restful, though I will be receiving anesthesia (and probably some pain-controlling narcotics, too) and will therefore be sleeping a ton.

But for now, a no-strings-attached five-day break.

I saw in the paper today that 43.6 million Americans will be traveling today, whether by plane (I imagine what the lines would be like at airports and feel glad that I'm not going that route) or by car (plus: no lines at airports, minus: traffic, second minus: cars are considerably more boring than planes). I'm not traveling at all. My family has decided to take it somewhat easy. After all, winter break will not be relaxing, at least for me. Might as well take what we can get. So we'll be doing Thanksgiving dinner, watching movies, reading. Taking a breath.

Which has been nice. Today, for instance, I woke up, read, cleaned myself up, went outside to sword-fight with my brothers, read some more. Well, technically it's a bout between pool noodles and foam swords, but still. It's nice being able to run around, especially seeing as the weather's quite lovely. To be fair, I wasn't paying much mind to the weather—foam swords have hard plastic cores, so I spent a solid amount of energy defending myself. Also apparently spent a fair amount of energy on getting my jacket covered in bits of leaves…I swear the thing is a magnet for general detritus (which then gets tracked into my room for the cat to eat).

As far as other updates go, I've now managed to get the contacts in with relative ease. Actually, I'm wearing them as I type this. They really are miraculous little things…I keep reaching up to play with the frames of my glasses, only to remember that I'm seeing quite well without needing annoying heavy cumbersome frames which support lenses that too frequently get dusty or fogged up from heat or humidity.

In other, unrelated news, I appear to be nearing the end of Stephen King's The Stand. I tried starting the book four years ago at the recommendation of an English teacher, only to be foiled by an edition with beyond-miniscule font (this despite the story playing out over 1100 pages). While at the bookstore recently, I spotted an edition with larger pages and readable font (over 1400 pages). During my last break, in October, I started the book on a plane. I kind of thought I'd still be trudging through its bulk while in the hospital with my leg skewered by a brand-new Taylor Spatial Frame. Apparently not. I still have 400 pages to go, but I'll have moved onto new and exciting stories come December.

Really, though, I'm just enjoying the ability to move around. To freely navigate the house, to play, to get up from my reading chair to raid the tortilla chips. And I'm finding it kind of hard to imagine life unable to walk, to roam. I know I've done it before, but, honestly, it's been years since I was in a wheelchair, and not in this house.

Should be interesting.

More Information

Slowly but surely, the details surrounding the frame are settling into place. There are still an awful lot of variables (such as how I'll manage to navigate our house, which has an unfortunate number of staircases and an unfortunate number of hallways which might be a bit too narrow for wheelchairs to comfortably pass through), but some of the major uncertainties have been resolved.

Now, these uncertainties have arisen from two conflicting sources of information: my surgeon and the nurse. Generally speaking, what the surgeon tells me hints at a less scary recovery, whereas the nurse generally alludes to terrifying potential realities. I've decided that I'm going to believe the surgeon, for three reasons:

1) The less time I spend in the hospital, the better

2) He's the one who's putting this thing on my leg in the first place

3) The information he tells me is more consistent with what I've heard

So…I will officially spend two to three days in the hospital. Four or five days after the frame is placed, pin adjusting and the actual process of leg straightening will begin. I will be in a wheelchair and completely non-weight-bearing for four to six weeks. I will roughly miss school for the month of January. Supposedly I'll be fully weight-bearing in about eight weeks, but I'm not entirely sure I trust that figure. The frame itself comes off after four to six months. Probably closer to six than to four.

Breaking from speculation involving my future, I've managed to be fairly productive today. Put the contact lenses in (I'm starting to get better at this, which is good, even if I still need a very specific set-up including a mirror which lights up, the dining room table and the presence of my mother). I also started the slow and steady process of trying to figure out what I'll be doing school-wise during the month of January. I've already got some writing projects, in the form of this blog and a story I've been playing around with, to keep me busy, but the sad truth of the matter is I'll still have some sort of academic expectations to fulfill.

As it turns out, though, those academic expectations might not be too bad. First, I'm dropping from a seven classes (the maximum at my school) to five next semester. Second, all of my teachers have been really understanding. The general line has been do what you can do, don't worry about missing content. While I'll definitely have some work to do (you can't just miss a month of Chinese and hope to come back relatively on top of things, and I might translate some Latin for fun), it looks like that part of my recuperation won't be too terrible. Which is good. I think I'll have enough on my plate.

That's all for tonight. At some point I've been meaning to fill in my previous history with surgeries and my particular bone disorder, so that'll probably be the next post. For now, I'm just getting excited for a five-day weekend starting Wednesday. Holidays truly are wonderful things…

Eyes Minus Frames

My legs are not the only imperfect parts of my body. My eyes need some help, too. Long story short, I've been wearing glasses since the fourth grade. Big, thick, heavy glasses, glasses that did their best to fade into nothingness, glasses which had unfortunate encounters with gravel driveways, glasses which had unfortunate encounters with concrete driveways, glasses which held together, glasses which managed to disintegrate…

My current pair of glasses is one of those pairs of glasses that has issues. Several unfortunate dives to the concrete driveway have resulted in chips in the lens. And then there are the frames. Now, in the best of times my glasses tend to wind up crooked. These particular glasses have managed to exceed all expectations for misbehavior. So without further adieu, my current pair of glasses:

(as I prefer them (minus the little flaws, such as crookedness and lens imperfections))

Though a bit crooked and dinged up, in this form they are intact. They stay on my head. This is not, however, how my glasses would like to look.

(as my glasses would like to look)

Note the one leg, mildly detached from the whole. This is a condition which can be triggered by a variety of sources, such as bus rides (I can't drive, so some days I ride a bus which manages to give air on straight, flat stretches of road with no major potholes), mild jolts, accidental brushings with fingers, general happiness, general unhappiness and just because.

Long story short, I got tired of the broken frames and chipped lenses. I decided to spring for contact lenses, picking up my first sets on Tuesday.

In theory, I love contact lenses. They allow me to see better and they get rid of the annoying frames on my face.

That's in theory.

In reality, contact lenses are massive pains to put on. It isn't the concept of potentially poking my eyes that gets me. I'm fine with that. The problem comes with getting them on my eyes in the first place. Apparently my eyes are a bit small and my eyelashes rather long, making it difficult to get those eyes open enough to stick the lens on top. I found this out the hard way on Tuesday. The eyeglasses store had to bring two people out to teach me. I dropped the lenses an impressive number of times. I took breaks. I paced around. Finally, a miracle happened: one lens went in. Then another.

At which point I had to learn to take them out. Surprisingly, that bit went well.

Flash-forward to Wednesday morning. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, trying and trying and trying to get my eye open wide enough for the contact to get in (hopefully before I need to leave for school). That didn't work out. My glasses returned for the day. The one leg tried to fall off the frame.

Wednesday afternoon. More trying. More pacing. Take a break. Try some more. Pace some more. Give up. Do homework.

Thursday evening. My mother, realizing I needed help, bought me a magnifying mirror. I set it up at my desk and tried to get a lens in. I took breaks. I listened to music to try to reduce the stress. And the thing still would not go in my eye. Until another minor miracle occurred and a lens actually went in. The other lens, though, was less cooperative. Despite chocolates for positive thinking and moving my entire ensemble down to the dining room table, the lens refused to go in and I gave up and went to bed.

This afternoon. Back at the dining room table. Surprisingly, my smallish eyes were capable of being opened wide enough for the lenses to go in. I triumphed.

At the moment, I am not wearing glasses. Though my vision is really quite awful, I am capable of seeing things in reasonable detail. I do not have frames on my face in order for this to occur. I am not entirely sure this ability to see is real.

Long story short: getting out of frames and into contacts? Miserable.

Seeing from contacts? Remarkable.

Flaws With My Inner Frog

I've had a long history of not competing on school sports teams. The main reason why I haven't done so is because the vast majority of sports teams require some running and I have been told many times in no uncertain terms that running with my crooked leg is not a good idea.

In my freshman year of high school when I moved from Virginia to Minnesota (halfway through my freshman year, January 2010, to be exact), I decided to just go for it and participate on a school team. I chose to be a fencer, ultimately leaning towards epee rather than foil or saber because epee involved learning fewer rules. As I quickly found out, fencing involves quite a lot of squatting, which means lots of stress on knees. There was also some running involved, not a ton. Long story short, I competed on the team for half a season, half a season meaning half a season of trying to wrap my mind around basic fencing concepts followed by the final meet, at which I more or less charged people without technique, hoping to score points (it didn't work).

I showed up for captains' practice the next season. That went fairly well. By that point, I'd been informed that my leg was not straight and it might need to be straightened. While those practices did help convince me that maybe my surgeon had a point, I remembered the frightening descriptions of life with a frame from On Writing and more or less ignored that possibility. I then went to the first official practice of the season. I learned that I would be unable to do fencing and other cherished activities (i.e., answering trivia questions for points, working on the school literary magazine). And that was the end of my fencing career.

Well, the end of my fencing career until Monday. For the past three school years, I have diligently shown up to sports practices and done my best to participate. Generally, those practices have formed some of my favorite parts of the school year. Because of my future friend the frame, I could very well not be able to go to any practices as an athlete capable of general movement, such as walking without crutches. Which is why I decided to go to the final fencing captains' practice. No commitment, because it was captains' and the coaches wouldn't be there. And because my leg would be frame-free, I would be able to do the exercises.

That was the plan, at any rate.

After classes got out on Monday, I wandered around the school for a little bit, glancing around. The school has a wheelchair lift into the math wing, which looks quite impressive but probably will not fit a wheelchair with a full leg extension. I watched that in action. Then I wandered down to the gym, changed, started practice.

I'm not going to get into a list of mundane specifics of what happened during practice. There were stretches, including some which involved standing on one leg (I'm not that balanced, tragically). There was a dodgeball-like game (yes, running…I started off just fine but quickly tired; oddly enough, it wasn't the leg that was causing me trouble but my hip which was feeling questionable—I'm hoping that the hip troubles reflect a lack of conditioning rather than joint problems). There were crunches (though not good at crunches, I love them dearly).

And then there were the frog hops. Frog hops can basically be described as what you do when you decide to emulate your inner frog in the quest for stronger leg muscles. You squat down, push off using both legs, hope your move forward, repeat, repeat, repeat. The team was told to go across the gym (short way) and back four times.

I made it across the gym and back once. Though my inner frog is apparently not a particularly graceful jumper, being somewhat uncoordinated and with the barest conception of what a real frog in motion looks like, I felt pleased with myself. Athletic participation? Instant triumph.

Round two. I start going. My leg was not feeling good. My mind was shouting about the frame being inserted into my leg within the next several months.

Long story short, I didn't make it all the way across. I stopped halfway to the finish line and stumbled the rest of the way, collapsing onto a chair. At that moment, frog hops joined the List of Activities Which Do Not Agree With Crooked Legs, a list which includes running for more than very long, wall sits for more than very long, squats, squat-jumps and fencing (and others which I am yet to subject myself to).

I more or less sat out the rest of the practice. While everybody else was finishing frog hops, I leaned against the wall to stretch my leg. My left leg (straight) is capable of being stretched. The right leg (not straight) is decisively less capable, probably because of its flawed geometry.

Which is to say, I made an honest effort at attending an athletic practice as a person capable of walking. It just could have gone a bit better.

Facts and Priorities

With bit less than a month and a half to go, I still know very little about what to expect with my Taylor Spatial Frame other than what I was told by the surgeon initially (should probably do some research…). The thing will straighten my leg. At some point it will probably be infected. If (when?) it gets infected, I could need to be re-hospitalized. After the procedure to place the frame on December 26, I will be in the hospital for somewhere between two and five days for pain control. Getting pants on over the frame will become a very interesting game. I will be moving downstairs from my second-floor bedroom so I can move around easier with my wheelchair. My mother is clearing stuff out of my future living-spaces this weekend.

I do have a new piece of information to add to the puzzle. Apparently I will miss about a month of school. Granted, I will miss about a month of the second semester of my senior year with my college apps done, done and done, so the academic pressure will be off, but still. That's a lot of content. So…that'll be interesting.

Really, that's it for new frame-related information. That said, I do have plenty to write about tonight, things I should have written about earlier but didn't have the time to. Now, before starting this blog, I scanned through other blogs and decided I liked them better when the posts weren't super long. Some of the posts here are already pretty long and I don't want this post to become the next War and Peace (or something like Stephen King's The Stand, a book large enough that it was recommended to me for its sheer heft (not to mention the fact that it's legitimately quite a good read)). Which is why I think I'll split today's post into a few mini-posts, each covering a different facet of what I want to cover.

Which is to say, this is the grab-bag post. I'll miss a month of school. And I had an interesting conversation today that's related enough to the general theme of the blog to be worth mentioning.

During Comparative Religion today, I was sitting next to another student whose throat has been causing him trouble, to the point where he's missed multiple days of school and been to the emergency room. Today he's undergoing throat surgery. He was nervously sifting through whatever information he could find online—a YouTube video of transplant surgery (I tried my best not to watch), an article asking whether general anesthesia was safe. Finally, he asked me about what it's like, surgery, whether you feel anything or…

I assured him you don't feel anything, that you go to sleep and the next thing you know you wake up and it's over with.

He asked if you dream, if you have any sense of the passage of time.

I said no. Not in my experience. But I did note the aftertaste is really quite awful.

When I had surgery for the first time, way back in third grade, the anesthesiologist described the smell of anesthesia to me as airplane gasoline. Now imagine airplane gasoline as a taste. That's what sticks in your mouth for days afterward. It's odd…I'm not concerned about waking up during my surgery in December. I am concerned about tasting airplane gasoline for days.

Perhaps I need to reevaluate my priorities?

Let's Chat Procedure

Before really starting, a quick update. Since last time, I’ve managed to submit my first college apps (yay!) and survive an alumni interview—actually quite fun. I got to chat about roller coasters and movies and other entertaining subjects. And I got to slurp down a sugary substance (granted, I paid for said sugary substance, but still). So that’s been good.

But I’ve been looking back on this blog and I realized that I really haven’t said much about the procedure I’m going to have. While my hope is to eventually switch to more up-to-date as-it’s-happening entries, I honestly have done nothing at the moment which warrants an entry. We don’t even have my pre-op appointment scheduled, nor have we delved into the wide and wonderful realm of making sure the school is handicap accessible. I’m pretty sure its handicap accessibility is not as strong as it should be, but that’s really a topic for when I know more about such matters (and have pictures of troublesome areas in my school).

Hence my current plan, which is to keep this blog floating with a stream of backstory, explaining who I am, what I’ve had done to me before, why this scares me, etc.

Here we go.

So. The first time I heard about an external fixator was the summer after eighth grade. I was thumbing through my copy of Stephen King’s On Writing when I got to the section where King discusses life after his 1999 car crash, life which happened to include a bone-stabilizing device which was set in his leg, featuring pins that poked out of his skin. I haven’t been scared much by King’s books, certainly not at this point (I read The Shining just this past winter). Then I got to this sentence: “I’ve never had my leg dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire, but if that ever happens, I’m sure it will feel quite a bit like daily pin-care” (268).

It was approximately in that moment that I decided I would never, never, never, never have an external fixator.

Less than a year later, I met my current orthopedic surgeon for the first time. He took an x-ray of my leg and immediately started drawing lines on top of it using his fancy orthopedic surgeon software. Said software told him within seconds that my right leg was not straight. The solution? External fixator.

I was not amused.

He started describing what the external fixator had done to other patients of his.

I went out and hid in the hallway until the coast was clear. Kerosene-dipped legs on fire, I thought. Kerosene-dipped legs on fire.

This most recent spring, my leg started feeling rather beat up. I was having troubles going up and down stairs (there are a lot of stairs at my school; while there is an elevator, it is a rather slow, scary elevator of doom and I'm quite convinced it's only a matter of time before it plummets to its doom). This was a problem. I returned to said surgeon and, within months, he had me convinced that this procedure was the right decision for my future.

But I have not actually discussed what the procedure is yet, not using clear terms.

So. During the procedure, the surgeons will remove wedges of my right tibia and fibula (the two bones in your lower leg). They will then place the Taylor Spatial Frame onto my leg. I will be sewn up and moved to my hospital room, where I will remain for a period of days for pain control (when the procedure was initially discussed, two to three days, but now I've heard four to five days and am feeling very confused). Before too long, we'll start making adjustments to the frame, which will straighten the bones out and before too long I'll have a straight leg. Then I'll just need to wait to get my frame removed and all will be well.

This will probably make more sense with pictures. I don't really want to attach pictures into this blog that I haven't taken, but I don't see any reason why I can't link to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_spatial_frame (NOTE: my frame will not necessarily look like the frame pictured with the article). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilizarov_apparatus is also rather helpful for understanding this procedure. Book-wise, the only thing I can think of is the final section of the aforementioned On Writing. King doesn't discuss his frame for very long (or with any fondness), but what he does have is clearly stated and informative, albeit a bit frightening.

That's all for now! Hopefully I'll write again soon…