A Blistering Start to Recovery

From what I've been told, the procedure itself went well. After I was put to sleep, an epidural was inserted into my back (for pain control—the thing, which stayed in for about three days, more or less paralyzed my right leg) and a catheter, required thanks to the epidural. At which point the surgery itself began, bone growths were removed, my tibia and fibula surgically broken, the frame put on. The breaks in the bone were achieved by drilling many small holes into the bone, then connecting the holes and are really rather clean. The frame itself is fixed to my leg by way of five six mm pins and two piano wire pins, all of which are attached to the tibia (the fibula is being left to its own devices, as far as I can tell). Apparently the thing is stable to the point that, if I wanted to and didn't mind the pain, I could walk on the leg immediately post-op. For the moment, for reasons which I hope are relatively self-explanatory, I've been trying to avoid putting too much weight on that leg.

Aside from the details, after about three hours in the OR, during which, according to what my anesthesiologist told me later, I lost only 50-75 milliliters of blood—the equivalent of about a fifth of a can of soda, I was moved to the recovery room, woke up and promptly proceeded to try to tell everybody I knew that I was out of surgery and it went well.

The trouble was, my spelling (and grammatical proficiency) had been somewhat altered by the fact that I had just been exposed to anesthesia, as evidenced by the following Facebook status update:

Out of surgery! Apparently operstion proper went well. Logs of windows in my my hospital room—always a positive. Surgical sites at a dull ache but still very happy surgery went well and optimistic for recovery ahead.

Why AutoCorrect didn't fix "operstion" is beyond me. And as far as the rest, well, grammar and morphine were not created to co-exist. Still…I was out of surgery, which counted for a lot. Even better, as much as I was terrified the surgery would result in lots and lots of pain, at the moment, I was feeling decently comfortable. A dull ache at the pin sites, no complaints from the incisions. And it stayed that way. Using the ten-point scale of pain (one: low pain, ten: worst pain you can imagine), the frame itself only ever got up to a three or a four as I was eased from the combination of epidural and morphine through an IV to oral pain medicine alone over the course of my six day stay.

Unfortunately, as things worked out, the most painful part my hospital stay would not be due to this friendly fellow:

Notes: 1) Clearly, the leg still needs to be straightened out a bit from this shot. 2) What looks like blood around the pin sites is actually just little plastic clips which keep the nice soft sponges over the pin sites themselves. Why the clips are red and not, say, blue or green, is beyond me. 3) The actual blood is from the incision to break the tibia and remove one of the bone growths. 4) Really isn't that bad, is it? At least not in this photo…

But rather thanks to this more innocent-looking bystander:

This boot, which placed on my foot in the OR for reasons explained below, is more or less evil incarnate. While some aspects of my hospital stay came home with me (i.e., polar fleece blankets the hospital let us keep, the frame itself, the tools needed to take care of the frame), the boot stayed behind. And good riddance.

The worry after placing the frame was that, due to the tendency to not hold my foot at a 90˚ ankle while lying in bed pumped full of pain medicine, my Achilles tendon would shorten or something, causing some problems down the line. The solution was the following set-up:

Foot in boot. Velcro straps attached to frame pull foot towards my head, stretching tendon and avoiding bad tendon problems. Ice packs help leg not swell up to extreme amounts.

The problem with that set-up was that, unbeknownst to us prior to my hospital experience, the bottom of my foot sports an impressive array of bone growths, which, combined with my blister from the Christmas Day walk and lots of pressure from the Velcro, resulted in lots of pain (I'd say up to a six or seven at points). After two days of having the boot and complaining about the boot (the most my complaints got me, at least for the first bit, was some time where the Velcro was removed to relax the pressure on the foot), Dr. Sundberg removed the boot.

This is what he saw:

Technically this is after two to three days of healing (for the first several days of boot-free foot, the pressure sore remained fairly constant, though it's started healing now). But still.

On the whole, my hospital experience was pretty positive (save for the foot, some of the food (their ability to prepare vegetables was…questionable), delays in being discharged on my final day, and one night where I got behind on pain medications). But at the same time, the whole experience with the boot was really not fun. Though I kept complaining, without a doctor's order, the nurses refused to remove the boot, which probably made things worse.

And that was more or less how my recovery began.