NOTE TO SELF: KILL DOCTOR

After six weeks of sitting around and thinking positive bone growth thoughts, I finally had my doctor's visit today. It went pretty much as I thought it would. He did the load transfer thingy he had talked to me about before, which basically just consisted of him loosening two of the three bolts on the side of my fixator. All three were locked before. Now only the bottom one is locked.

Here's a not very exciting picture of the two bolts he loosened:



After he loosened them, he had me get up and stand in front of him. After I didn't fall down in pain, he told me to walk around the room a bit. He said if my leg re-broke from the increased weight bearing, I'd know it and "wouldn't be liking me very much right now". I don't like him at all to begin with, but that's beside the point.

He said he transferred over 50% of the load from the fixator onto my bone, which immediately made me paranoid about walking around and rebreaking my leg. But my doctor is very conservative, and I know he wouldn't have done it if he wasn't sure that my bone could take it.

He actually said that some doctors would remove my fixator at this point, but he likes to do the slow removal, taking off pieces of the fixator every week or so until only the pins remain. So I go back next week to have a piece of the fixator removed, and then perhaps also the week after to have more or all of it removed.

He said the whole fixator removal process should be about a month longer, which is great news. The not so great news is that he said I'd have to go back on crutches for up to 6 weeks after having the surgery to remove the pins. At almost every single doctor's appointment I've had, I've been trying to get this information out of him. He always blew me off. Now he drops this bomb on me.

I knew there would be some amount of time on crutches, but 6 weeks seems like an awful lot. And the bone stays weak for even longer than that, so it's going to probably be a year or so in total from surgery to where I'm doing anything super strenuous without fear of breakage.

So, looks like about two and half more months of sitting around waiting for my leg to heal. I'm seriously running out of ways to entertain myself. I've even started reading books and, like, watching the news. Help!