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.

A Final Pre-Operative Update

Technically speaking, it's almost one in the morning and I have to be up at six to go to the hospital for the first of day in a stay which will be somewhere in the two- to four-day range. And for the surgery itself. Mustn't forget that. But I got to thinking about this blog and how I really haven't been updating it like I should be (two back-story entries down, something like eleven to go…and no mention yet of my mindset with the procedure itself imminent) and my ability to write post-surgery can be described best by the word 'questionable.' As a quick side-note, though, I have updated the technical settings of this blog to allow my mother to post updates, which I imagine (I hope) will come throughout the day.

Which is why I'm writing now.

I figure that it doesn't really matter how much sleep I get tonight. After all, they'll be sticking a needle in my arm tomorrow morning (I hate needles) and then it'll be lights out for a few hours. And then I'd assume there will be the traditional post-anesthesia nap sometime in the afternoon. Perhaps some ginger ale to drink, too. Ginger ale after surgery is always a plus.

But…it's tomorrow (well, today, technically…it's after midnight).

My surgery is actually today. Which means that yesterday was the final day of my life when I didn't know what wearing a frame was like, the final day of my life with a crooked and frame-free leg, which, if you think about it, is kind of a bigger deal than it sounds like.

So, Natcher, you're having somewhat major life-changing surgery this morning, about seven hours, in fact. How does it feel?

I don't know. When I woke up yesterday, instead of thinking, "Oh! It's Christmas! Is my stocking in my room or has it been stowed safely downstairs away from the reach of the ever-hungry golden retriever?" I thought, "I'm having surgery tomorrow and I don't know what it will be like." And then, for the first part of the day, going downstairs for a light breakfast and examining the stocking, getting in the car to go to church, sitting in the pew, cramped by several relatively large fellow church-goers, I felt sick, I was so nervous.

As mass continued, though, I did start feeling less sick—it's amazing what Christmas carols and hymns can do. And by the end, when we were leaving, my mother offered to let us light a votive candle. With a prayer for strength and for faith, I lit my candle.

The rest of the day was fairly quiet. I tried to work through some more college applications and am mostly done now (as in, six down with the final application barely started). We opened gifts (I got new scarfs, some money for my Kindle, which should be helpful for the hospital stay, and books, both in English and Latin, which makes me very happy). We tied ribbons on the dogs. We ate dinner. We watched the Muppet Christmas Carol.

Also of note: my family more or less lives on a lake. There's a path which goes all the way around that the city paves in winter. I've made it all the way around on foot something like five or six times (maybe more). Months ago, after the surgery was scheduled but well before the seasons changed and snow arrived, I informed my father we were going to walk all the way around the lake on Christmas Day, seeing as it was my last day walking and all.

So we walked all the way around the lake.

According to my mother repeating the TV weather forecasters said, this year marked the coldest Christmas in Minnesota in something like twenty years. The temperature hovered below a toasty ten degrees or so Fahrenheit. It was cold enough that my mother offered me her warmer, longer jacket to wear and our English Cocker Spaniel, who, if he finds out anybody is going on a walk, will have several heart attacks and a stroke if not taken along, wore a jacket (since he's gained some weight recently, it barely fit). His initial enthusiasm for the walk also seemed to freeze, since less than halfway through he started heading rather decisively for home.

And, yes, it was cold outside. My cheeks, which remained uncovered throughout the walk, were still pink half an hour after coming back inside. The cold easily ate through my jeans, though my feet were protected by a pair of boots. But, really, it was my last chance to go around that lake for the next six months or so. Of course I was making it all the way around.

About the boots, though… The pair I wound up wearing was extremely loose on me. I first put on a pretty tight-fitting pair. Unfortunately, the boot was rubbing up against bone growths on my ankle, which would have made it difficult for me to make it around the lake. So, at the first available bench, my father offered to see if we could switch shoes. As it turned out, the pair I was wearing fit him okay and the pair he was wearing fit me okay and, more importantly, accommodated my ankle.

What I did not account for was a three-mile, hour-plus walk in really loose boots resulting in some fairly substantial blisters on the bottom of my feet (thankfully, really just the right foot, which will be very, very, very non-weight-bearing shortly). Since blisters are apparently cause to cancel surgeries, I'm not supposed to mention this tomorrow morning.

But still. I made it around the lake.

Considering the probable state of my mobility tomorrow, that's something.