Thursday, June 28, 2007

UM, WHAT?

Yesterday my doctor’s secretary called me. She said that my doctor told her to instruct me to uncrank my fixator for the next two days. Instead of lengthening four turns of ninety degrees a day like I’ve been doing, I’m to turn the crank ninety degrees, four times a day, but in the other direction. Um, what?

Apparently, this might help with my pin site issues. Aside from my one pin site which may or may not be infected, both my top and bottom pin sites are starting to get very irritated. My doctor warned me that some of the pin sites, particularly the top and bottom ones, might need to be cut open a little bit more, because the lengthening might cause tearing in them once they heal up.

I think that must be what’s happening. I don’t think I’ll need to have any of them cut open, since I’m so close to being done with the lengthening, but it’s very aggravating to have to stop the lengthening now, because I only had two days of it left. Now I’m not only not lengthening, but I’m setting myself back two days with the uncranking.

I’m loathe to uncrank, because every crank was hard fought to achieve. But my pin sites are bothering me enough that I’m willing to try anything to make them feel better. And I’m probably technically done with the lengthening anyway, since my doctor was having me over-lengthen a bit so he could compress when he’s back from vacation.

My pin sites and the skin around them are also horribly dry. I’m dying to put some kind of cream on them, but my doctor says absolutely not. I’ve read of various pin site care methods on the internet, and most of them say that using an antibiotic cream is fine and helps with the dryness, but my doctor says a dry pin site is a good pin site. He also says for me to stop reading the internet and listen only to him. Ugh, fine.

My doctor wants me to email him tomorrow and let him know how the uncranking affected my pin sites. I’m not sure if he’ll then tell me to start lengthening again, but I’m trying to have a whatever attitude about it. I really wanted to be done with the lengthening by the time I went back to work on Monday, but if I have to lengthen for a few days while at work, it won’t be that much of an issue.

And Shannon, if you’re reading this, thanks for the cute get well card! I got it yesterday.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

CUT OFF FROM CIVILIZATION

We’ve been without internet access in the apartment since last Friday. The problem turns out to be a frayed wire buried in the ground at the back of our apartment complex, and apparently it’s a job so complicated that even Time Warner Cable needs to contract it out. It won’t be fixed until July 5th. Thank baby Jesus that the TV cable still works.

Not much to report on the leg front, except for one of my pin sites appears to be infected. It’s red around the rim of it, swollen, painful and very, very itchy. Like I want to tear off my skin itchy.

I upped my antibiotics from two a day to four a day, then emailed my doctor, who is in Israel, or Italy, or some other country beginning with an I that I would know if I was paying attention when he told me, and he wrote back within the day and told me to continue with the increased antibiotics for 48 more hours and apply increased pressure to the site.

When I showered and cleaned my pin sites yesterday, the infected site looked a little better, so hopefully the increased antibiotics are doing the trick. They are certainly doing a number on other parts of my body.

Kelly went back to work this week (which is how this is getting posted, thanks Kelly!), so I’ve been on my own in the apartment during the days, which has been okay. It’s hard to get up and get things for myself, like food from the fridge, because I have to somehow hold whatever it is in my hand and still use both of my crutches. But I’m managing, and it’s good practice for me before I go back to work.

I have two more physical therapy sessions before I head back to work next Monday, and I’m really hoping I can do a good amount of weight bearing during them. I’m getting very eager to start walking again.

And I only have three more days of lengthening left. Woohoo! I’m even starting to count down the number of cranks. Only eleven more!

Saturday, June 23, 2007

DOES THIS FIXATOR MAKE MY ANKLE LOOK FAT?

The last few days have been mostly uneventful. I only have seven days of lengthening left, and I'm counting them down practically by the minute. The pain is pretty much the same, but I'm trying to cut down on the Vicodin a little, since I'll only have two days after I finish the lengthening before I have to go back to work, and I don't want to go to work on a lot of Vicodin, but I also don't want to drop down off of it too fast.

My biggest concern right now is my ankle swelling. It's been fairly swollen this whole time, but the swelling significantly increased last weekend, and it's taken me several days of keeping it elevated above my heart to get the swelling to go down to a managable level. But it's still swollen, and painfully so.

The last few physical therapy sessions I've been up on my crutches putting some weight on my leg and trying to take a step through, though I haven't managed to do that yet. I'm really itching to be able to walk on it.

But the ankle swelling is annoying me, and I'm worried that when I go back to work, I'm not going to be able to elevate it as much, and it's going to swell up even more. My physical therapist says that when I am able to walk on it, the swelling will go down, so walking is the ultimate goal.

For now, though, it's elevation, and some manual displacement of the swelling, courtesy of Kelly:



And this morning, Kelly's dad and his wife, Bobbie stopped by while they were in town for business:



Days of lengthening left: 7

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

SURGERY WHILE AWAKE

Another doctor's appointment today, another set of xrays. The xrays showed so much more space in between my tibia and fibula breaks than last time, and in those spaces you can see new bone starting to form. It looks like cloudy white specs. My doctor estimates that I've already lengthened between 1.6 cm and 1.8 cm, so he wants me to lengthen for ten more days, and then I'll be done with the lengthening. Hooray!

He also saw that my tibia was starting to drift over toward my fibula, so he had to correct that using the fixator. He put the wrench in one of the holes on top of the fixator and cranked it, and it felt like my knee was being moved over to the side inside my leg. He referred to this as "surgery while awake."

Yeah. It hurt. And my leg has been very painful ever since. Excellent. Apparently I may need little adjustments like this from time to time. It's pretty crazy that he can basically move around all the bones in my lower leg using the fixator. I thought the lengthening was the extent of the fixator's powers.

My doctor is going out of town for two weeks, so I'm on my own for a while. My next appointment with him isn't until July 10th, when he told me that I have to take an xray standing up, with my leg completely straight and my foot on the floor. So I have a lot of range of motion to accomplish before then.

Paige and Beth came over tonight for a visit. They didn't want their pictures taken, not wanting them to be posted on the blog. Too bad!





Thanks for coming to visit, guys.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

TIGHT JOINTS

The last two days have been relatively good. My doctor told me to take the lengthenings back down to four a day, instead of six, then try to build back up slowly. So I've done four lengthenings the last two days, but I think I'll try five today. Hopefully my pain level won't shoot back up.

Sleeping has been a little easier the last two nights, too. Not to jinx myself, but I think I may have finally gotten the Vicodin/lengthening schedule down so that I can sleep for three hour periods at a time. I've been setting an alarm to wake me up for my pain pills, and I've actually been sleeping until the alarm goes off, and then I've been able to go back to sleep after taking my pill. Last night I was up from three a.m. to four a.m., but other than that, I slept the whole night.

And during the day, my pain level has been bearable enough that I'm starting to tackle a little more aggressively my knee and ankle mobility. I've been very good about my ankle, using a towel to wrap around the back of my foot, then pulling it toward me and stretching my ankle that way.

But I haven't been as good about my knee. It's pretty much just been resting on a pillow this whole time, so while bending it has been no problem, completely straightening it was starting to get kind of difficult. So I've been forcing myself the last two days to keep my leg resting straight out in front of me on the couch instead of on a pillow. I still can't sleep without a pillow under my knee, that's just too much pressure on my joint, but my knee mobility has greatly improved the last two days from keeping it straight. Phew.

I'm very lucky that my insurance has approved home physical therapy sessions for me. Three times a week, Steve the physical therapist has been coming to my apartment to crank my ankle and knee, massage out swelling, and force me to do things I don't want to do.

Here's Steve cranking my ankle as I wince in pain:



Steve really wants to do a lot more with me, get me up and putting weight on my leg and even trying out the stairs, but my pain level has been so high that we've had to put off that stuff until after the lengthening. But now that I'm feeling a little better, or feeling more used to the pain level, I'm hoping that I can try a few weight bearing exercises during my physical therapy sessions this week.

I'm not going back to work tomorrow, like I had originally planned, but I'm either going to go back next Monday or the Monday after that, and I have a long way to go in order to be mobile enough to get around my office.

Friday, June 15, 2007

HOUSE OF PAIN

Last night was a sleepless night. I think the additional lengthening my doctor ordered finally caught up with me, and even though I'm taking Vicodin every three hours and spacing my lengthenings out every six hours, I couldn't get the pain under control last night.

At its best, my pain level is about a three or a four, but never lower than that. I find it somewhat hilarious that doctors measure pain based on this silly one to ten scale of unhappy faces, but whatever. I guess it's useful in that it's simple and universal.



A three or four is tolerable enough to sleep, especially when I'm really tired. When I'm getting close to needing another pain pill, my pain goes up to about a five or six. If I wake up and my pain is around that level, I need to distract myself until the pain pill kicks in and the pain level goes back down. Then I can fall back asleep.

But every few days, I sky rocket into the eight or nine level. This usually happens at night. And once I'm at that level, there's nothing I can do about it. The Vicodin doesn't even touch the pain. I basically just have to wait, stop the lengthening entirely, and restart it once I've had about four or five doses of Vicodin.

I called my doctor this morning, since last night was another one of these eight or nine pain level nights. He told me to hold off on the lengthening for the moment and call him back in three hours to give him an update. Now I'm waiting for him to call me back. I don't want to get too off my lengthening schedule, but I'm not exactly eager to start again.

The weekend before I had my surgery, a friend of mine in Vegas, David, got into a water skiing accident and wound up needing an external fixator to hold his broken knee in place. His fixator actually connects his upper and lower legs so he can't even bend his knee or hip. We've been emailing and comparing stories, and I finally saw a picture of his fixator today.



Man, I feel for you, David. Your fixator looks much worse than mine. :(

Thursday, June 14, 2007

SPONGE WORTHY

I've been covering my pin sites with these nifty little sponges:



It's called an Ilizarov sponge, and there's a slit up the side of it, so it can open up and wrap around the pin itself. Then it just sits on top of the pin site, I lower a compression clip down on top of it, and that's it, the pin site is covered.

When I left the hospital, my doctor gave me a pack of these sponges, because they are impossible to get outside of a hospital. And now I'm down to my last set of sponges.

Now I'll have to go to a more complicated system of folding up sterile gauze, then cutting it with scissors that I have to sterilze each time with rubbing alcohol. It's just an annoying extra step in an otherwise already complicated process of cleaning my pin sites.

First I have to boil water to mix with some hydrogen peroxide. We tried today to get some sterile saline solution from the drug store, in order to avoid having to boil water every single time, but apparently you need a prescription for saline solution. Um, what? Is there a way to get high from drinking it or something?

Each pin site needs to be cleaned with sterile q-tips, and I can only use each q-tip for basically one swipe. And I have to be very careful not to touch my leg, or the fixator, or the pin itself. Touching the pin site with a q-tip that has touched something else can cause infection.

The hydrogen peroxide stings a little, but not too much, because it's diluted by the water. It's necessary to remove any protein crusts that form around the pin site. These do not come off in the shower, and can pick up bacteria easily, so they have to be removed.

I also have to clean the length of the pin itself, being careful not to touch the pin site with the q-tip I'm using to clean the pin. For each pin site, I use about ten sterile q-tips. Since I only have four pin sites, it's not so horrible. If I had an Ilizarov fixator instead of a monolateral fixator, I'd have ten or more pin sites, so I'm lucky in that regard.

Ashley and Wes were nice enough to pop over for a visit the other night. Thanks guys! Visiting me gets you an automatic picture on the blog:

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

MORE ANGRY, LESS OF AN INCH

Good news at the doctor's office today. The xrays showed that my bone is actually growing quite fast. However, because it's growing so fast, my doctor is a little worried that the breaks are going to heal before the lengthening can be completed. To counter this, he suggests even more lengthening per day, six turns of ninety degrees a day instead of four. Sign me up!

But the good news in this is that this should shorten the amount of time it's going to take to finish the lengthening. Hopefully in about two weeks or less, I should be completely done with it. Of course my pain level is going to increase, but my doctor said I could take a Vicodin every three and a half hours now instead of every four hours. Gee, thanks.

Even with the extra pain, I'm very happy to hear that my bone is responding well to the lengthening process. Adults don't always respond well to lengthening, so it's definitely a relief to find out my leg is. I go back to the doctor next Tuesday for a fresh set of xrays, and he said we should really be able to see then how much longer this lengthening is going to take.

I talked to my boss today (hi Roz!) and we decided that I definitely wouldn't be back to work next Monday, like we had planned, and I may even take the following week off as well, but I'll know better after my next doctor's appointment. Once the lengthening is done, the pain should be gone, and I'll be able to go back to work. Unless I wind up in rehab for pain pill addiction, that is.

My doctor also removed the dressings from my incisions today. There are four: one where he broke the tibia, one where he broke the fibula, one for the screw above my ankle and one for the screw below my knee.

Here's the incision where he inserted the above the knee screw:



And here are the incisions here he broke the fibula and inserted the above the ankle screw:



And here's the incision where he broke the tibia:



Apparently there are internal stitches at these sites, but I honestly have no idea how he was able to do so much through these tiny holes! How do you break a bone and wind up with an incision site the size of an eraserhead?

I no longer have to cover these incision sites, so that's nice. I feel a little less like a bandaged mummy without them all wrapped up.

So all and all, a good day. More pain, but more hope, and finally a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

MORE DRUGS, LESS LENGTHENING

Every morning I've been writing up a schedule for pill taking and lengthening for that day. I had been creating this schedule around the idea that I'd get about eight hours a night of sleep, but since it's turning out that I'm unable to sleep for more than an hour and a half to two hours at a time, I decided to try scheduling the lengthenings and pain medication dosages throughout the night, too.

Now instead of lengthening every four hours while I'm awake during the day, I lengthen every six hours, including once over night. I'm hoping that stretching out the lengthenings like this will alleviate some of the pain associated with them.

One limb lengthening site I read said that though bone can grow 1 mm a day, the surrounding muscles and stuff really can't grow that much a day, so apparently it's much less painfull to aim for somewhere between .66 mm and .83 mm per day of lengthening.

Since most of my pain has been in my ankle from the stretching of ligaments and whatnot, I can see how a slower lengthening schedule would really help the pain management. But my doctor has me on a 1 mm per day schedule, and since I want to get this done as soon as possible, I'm sticking with it.

And in order to stick with it, I'm allowing myself the full six vicodin per day I've been prescribed. I take one every four hours now, including throughout the night. I even set an alarm clock so I'm sure not to miss a dose, though my leg has been doing a superb job of waking me up when I'm due for one.

Friday, June 8, 2007

DAILY 2 A.M. BLOG POST

It's 2 a.m., again, and I'm up, again, waiting until it's time to take another Vicodin. I think I'm pretty close to getting this "staying ahead of the pain" thing down. I used to think that advice was a bunch of crap, but I guess I've never really been in pain before in my life, because it most definitely is not a bunch of crap.

Anyway, I took a shower yesterday and cleaned my pin sites. It's starting to get a little easier to do, both the shower itself, and especially the pin site care, which still grosses me out. Most of the time, my pin sites are covered by white sponges, so it's not that glaringly obvious that I have these four metal bars drilled into my leg. But when I take them off to shower, there's no denying it.







Even though the pin sites look disgusting, they are actually really healthy. No pain, no swelling, no redness, no oozing. No sign of infection. But I'm not getting too excited. Pretty much everyone who has an external fixator gets a pin site infection at some point, and there's not necessarily much you can do to prevent them. Also I'm still on antibiotics, so that could be helping fend infection off, too.

Here's Kelly playing Tetris while we wait for my drugs to kick in. I'm going to owe her big time after all this.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

AN UNEVENTFUL DAY, FINALLY

Today was a blissfully uneventful day. No trips to the ER, no doctor's appointments, no physical therapy. I'm now into my second week of this process, and I'm finally starting to feel like I'm turning a corner.

I woke up this morning in a good amount of pain so I decided to try out the Vicodin for the first time. I took a whole one, and for a couple of wonderful hours, I was pain-free. And loopy as hell. But then the nausea hit, and I spent a couple of hours eating crackers and drinking ginger ale. Apparently, a whole Vicodin is a bit too much for my stomach.

When it came time to take the next dose of pain medication, I took only 1/3 of a Vicodin. I've been lengthening every four hours during the day, and taking pain medication about half an hour to forty-five minutes before the lengthening. The 1/3 of a Vicodin seemed to be fine for a few hours, but started wearing off too soon, so now I'm trying 2/3 of a Vicodin before my next lengthening.

Through all of this trial and error I really hope to figure out the best pain medication schedule to handle the lengthening pain but also allow me to be lucid enough to do my exercises and not want to barf. For some reason, I really thought I'd be able to handle this lengthening process with little, or no, pain medication.

Thankfully, it should only be about three more weeks of this, and then the pain should significantly decease once I'm done with the lengthening. I can't imagine what people who have several inches of lengthening to achieve must go through.

Also, anyone who does leg lengthening for cosmetic reasons is absolutely nuts.

PAIN MANAGEMENT

It's about 3:30 a.m., and I'm up because of the pain. It's not horrible, but I'm probably not taking enough pain medication to cover it. So I'm up, waiting for some Codeine to kick in.

Last night, the pain was ridiculously bad, and I called my doctor about it. He said to uncrank my fixator twice and see him at his office in the morning. Turns out, there was a "misunderstanding" about how much I am supposed to be cranking my fixator. He claims he said one thing, Kelly and I heard another. Bottom line is that I was over-lengthening it. I thought I was supposed to be cranking it 4 times a session, with 4 sessions a day. Turns out it's just once a session, with 4 sessions a day.

But before we could deduce that, I got a lecture from my doctor about pain management. Nevermind that I was doing four times the amount of lengthening I was supposed to. Now he thinks I'm a wimp. He prescribed Vicodin to take instead of the Codeine I have been taking, and told me that I have to tough it out.

I did get a new set of xrays with this doctor's visit, and I got to see xrays of my broken leg for the first time. I wish I had my camera to take a picture of them. The breaks in my tibia and fibula are so clean and straight, and my doctor said he could already see some lengthening. Sweet.

The pain from the lengthening is mostly in my ankle, like a tightness. Stretching it helps a little, but also hurts, too. And my whole leg just sort of aches. But again, it's not horrible. I really think that once I get my pain medication right, I'll be able to sleep through the night.

Last night Kate came over for dinner. She brought me #1, #3 and #4 of the new Buffy comic book series (#2 was sold out).



Though I'm not a big comic book fan, they look really cool and I'm looking forward to reading them. They are about the length of my attention span these days. I can't seem to commit myself to any long periods of reading, or even watching a full movie. Maybe after I get my pain medication right, I can finally start on the stack of movies and books on my coffee table.

Days of lengthening left: approximately 22

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

NOT QUITE A MEDIEVAL TORTURE DEVICE, BUT CLOSE

My fixator, though it looks like a 3-hole puncher, is more like a slide ruler. Here's a close-up of it:



The top part of it slides up as the leg lengthens. My doctor loosened the screw on the back of the top part of the fixator so it can now move.

At the top of the fixator is a hole in which to insert the wrench:



The wrench is 5mm Allen wrench, whatever that means. I put it in at such an angle so that I can get a 15 degree turn:



It winds up looking like this:



I do that four times in one session, and then repeat that four times a day. So sixteen cranks a day in total.

What does it feel like? It's kind of hard to describe. The best description I can think of right now is that awful feeling you get in your bones when fingernails scratch across a chalkboard. It doesn't hurt, exactly, but it feels really weird and uncomfortable.

The lengthening is starting to make my leg hurt. My bone aches now, and my ankle feels tight. I'm beginning to see how important stretching and flexing my ankle is going to be in order to keep mobility.

After just a few times, I'm already dreading each turning of the screw. Good thing I have Lamar here to do it for me:



Days until removal of the fixator: approximately 78

Monday, June 4, 2007

MY FIRST 911 CALL

I was feeling pretty great on Saturday. I took a shower, washed my hair (okay, Kelly washed it), and aside from being somewhat traumatized by the site of my bare pin sites, it went really well. I sat on the shower seat that we bought and hosed down my pin sites with plain water, no soap, just like my doctor told me. Actually, it's kind of surprising how little pin site care he said I needed to do. No elaborate process like I thought, just wash, dry, and re-cover.

The pin sites themselves looked great. No blood or pus or oozing of any kind. I re-covered them with these wrap around sponge type things they gave me at the hospital. A home aide nurse came around 4 p.m. to check me out, and said I was doing very well. And I really was. My pain was minor, and I was down to only 1/2 of a codeine every 3 hours.

Then suddenly, around 6 p.m., I started to run a high fever, completely out of the blue. It hit me like a truck. One minute I was fine, the next minute I couldn't move. My heart was racing, and I was shaking violently. Something had to be horribly wrong, I thought. Maybe something got infected in the shower?

Kelly called my doctor's service. Half an hour went by, and no word from him. She called his cell phone. Another half an hour. Nothing. She called the immediate care number at the hospital where I had the surgery. The nurse there said the resident couldn't treat me over the phone, that I had to come in. But I couldn't move off of the couch, let alone get down 5 flights of stairs. The nurse told Kelly to call 911.

At that point, I was apparently delirious, starting to talk to myself and not very responsive. Kelly called 911. The EMTs arrived in about 5 minutes and put me on a stretcher to carry me down the stairs. Just then, my doctor called. Two hours after we first called him.

By the time I got to the hospital, the IV saline they were giving me in the ambulance, combined with the massive amounts of Tylenol Kelly had given me had finally kicked in and my fever was starting to drop.

The resident at the hospital looked at my dressings and said everything looked pristine. There was no infection. Apparently, fevers are common after surgery. I probably wasn't taking enough Tylenol to fend it off. Gosh, I wish someone had told me that. Like my doctor. Ahem.

Since there was no way I was making it back up the 5 flights of stairs to my apartment after leaving the ER, we went to my cousin Rick's hotel room at the W, and sent him to stay in our apartment for the rest of his trip. We're now staying here until tomorrow, when I'll try to make it back home. But I feel 100% better, and very strong, so I'm sure it'll be fine.

I'm going to the doctor later today, for my first check up and for my first lengthening. I'll definitely report back on what kind of sensation that is.

Days until removal of the fixator: approximately 79

Friday, June 1, 2007

HOME SWEET JESUS MY LEG IS BROKEN

I've finally shaken off my drug haze, so I'm going to attempt to get this surgery rundown posted before I pass out again.

We arrived at the hospital at 6:00 am on Wednesday morning. The lobby was already full of people having surgery that day. After being herded into the surgery waiting room and tagged with our hospital bracelets, we sat with our loved ones and waited until they called us back four at a time into another surgery waiting room.

In this new surgery room was a row of comfy chairs, each with a sign above it reading the name of a doctor. I looked around for my doctor's sign. It wasn't in the main room, but instead in this smaller, brightly colored room. Oh yeah, I remembered. My doctor operates mostly on children.

So in the pediatrics waiting room I sat, watching Barney and Sesame Street, with a bratty four year old girl who was having some sort of arm surgery and a sweet Hispanic seven month old girl who was wearing a body cast. When they took the baby away for her surgery, her young, non-English speaking mother cried quietly to herself as she left the room, which made me cry. Any self-pity I was feeling evaporated in that moment.

Kelly was allowed back to hang out with me around 7:30 a.m. Here's me sitting in my surgery garb waiting for my doctor to arrive:



My doctor arrived around 8:00 a.m. and talked with us about the surgery. Kelly liked him immediately, and any unease I was feeling about the surgery disappeared upon seeing him. The man just knows what he's doing. He autographed my right leg with a "G", the first letter of his last name, which I thought was cooler than writing a giant "NO" on my left leg.

Here's my leg before he mangled it:



Around 8:45 a.m., they took me back to the operating room, which looked like some sort of supply closet. I climbed onto the operating table as I watched some doctor-type guy I had never met sort through what looked like props from the movie Hostel. The anesthesiologist put in my I.V., told me she was going to start giving me some saline, and the next thing I remember, I was in the recovery room.

My doctor and Kelly were standing over me, and apparently I was smiling, because everyone kept saying "Oh look, she's smiling." I was in and out of it in the recovery room and my leg really hurt, which I was rather surprised about. I kept asking for more morphine, which they injected into my I.V. Once I got my maximum allowed amount of morphine, they transfered me to my hospital room. Which, surprise, was on the pediatrics floor. A lobster with my name on it marked the door to my room.

Once in my hospital room, they gave me a shot of Demerol in my arm, which was a thousand times more effective than the morphine. I had a roommate for about ten minutes, some woman in her thirties named Dawn, which I only remember because the phone kept ringing the rest of the time I was the hospital with people asking for her. Dawn is a popular girl, apparently.

I was pretty comfortable in my hospital room, with my leg wrapped up and all the way at the end of my body where I couldn't really see it.

Here's a picture of it all wrapped up:



I could somewhat see the contraption that hid underneath the white gauze, but I kept it out of my mind. My more immediate problem was the bathroom problem. I won't go into too much detail, but the bedpan situation was definitely the worst part of my hospital stay, and I had my freaking leg broken!

Also, nurses are an interesting bunch. Some are incredibly nice, kind, understanding and giving. Some apparently hate humankind. Night nurses appear to uniformly fall into the latter group. Kelly had to go home at 9 p.m., overstaying her visiting hours by an hour. So I was left with the night nurses, who aside from coming into your room the minute you've managed to fall asleep to take your temperature or blood pressure, seem to think nothing else really warrants a trip to your room.

And I kept throwing up. The pain medication made me nauseous, and I hadn't been able to eat anything except for ice chips. I slept very little that first night.

Visiting hours didn't begin until 11 a.m. the next morning, but Kelly sneaked in around 7 a.m. She's stealth like that. For some reason, nurses who won't listen to a patient will listen to a family member, and Kelly was able to get someone to get me out of bed and into the bathroom. I will never take the simple act of being able to use a bathroom for granted again.

My doctor arrived a little while later and unwrapped my bandage. And there it was, the external fixator, in all its glory:



Jesus. I'm not going to lie. It was much bigger than I thought it was going to be.

My doctor grabbed my external fixator and shook it. I was too shocked to say anything, but he asked me, "did that hurt?" and I had to admit that it really didn't. Apparently, the fixator holds the bone in place so that the break doesn't really hurt. And you can walk on it. He told me that he wanted me out of bed and in the shower and walking around. He'd be back later to discuss my discharge, which might be later that day but probably the next day.

The nurse who helped me shower was one of nicest people I've ever met. First she took off the sponges that surround the pins of my external fixator, and for the first time I got to see the pins going directly into my leg.

Because I would not want to deprive you, gentle readers, of this wonderful sight, here's a picture:



And here's a close-up:



Once the nurse got me in the shower room, she and Kelly proceeded to hose me down like some sort of elephant in the circus. Water can run freely over the pin sites, and the other incisions on my leg were sealed with plastic, so I could get those wet, too.

Then the physical therapist came and brought me my new best friends, my crutches. She told me there's nothing stopping me from putting weight on my leg. Nothing except pain, that is. But because of the fixator, I can't do any damage to the bone by walking on it. She taught me how to walk with the crutches and took me to some stairs to practice going up and down. Down was easy. Up was impossible. We decided that when I went home, I'd be going up the stairs on my butt.

I was finally starting to feel better. I was able to eat some dry cereal and I was off the Demerol and on Tylenol with codeine. I relaxed in my room while waiting for my doctor to visit and discuss with me my discharge plans.

But then the evil nurse of the north came in and told me I was going home right then. It was too upsetting and ridiculous of an episode to relay entirely, but basically, the nurse got some random resident to discharge me without talking to my doctor. When I protested, saying that I felt too weak to get up my stairs, having only had some dry cereal to eat in two days, she berated me with statements like, "What, do you plan on staying a whole month?" Thankfully, my doctor showed up just then, bitched out both the nurse and the resident, and I was allowed to stay until the next morning.

That night was much better. Kelly tried to sneak an overnight stay, but we got busted around 9:30 p.m. and she had to leave. But I slept most of the night, and she came back around 7:00 a.m. the next morning, this time with my cousin Rick, who had taken the red eye in the night.

He was tired, so here he is sleeping with Lamar Bear, waiting for me to be discharged:



The discharge was relatively easy and I was wheeled out of the hospital. Getting a cab was a little difficult. Most of them don't want to stop for someone on crutches. We begged the cab driver to take the drive easy, and he actually did, so it was mostly painless.

Getting up the stairs was very difficult. I was exhausted halfway up the first set of stairs. Thankfully Rick and Kelly were there to pick me up at the end of each set of stairs. Once inside the apartment, I crashed on the couch, took two Tylenol with codeine, and passed out. Several hours later, I woke up and felt much better.

I slept well on the couch last night, and now I feel pretty good. It's still pretty messed up to look at my leg. It doesn't really seem real. But the pain is okay, the crutches are getting easier, and I think the toughest stuff is behind me.

A home nurse is supposed to come later today. I'm going to try to wash my hair. My first appointment with my doctor is on Monday, and he wants to start the lengthening then. Though the thought of getting down and up those stairs scares me, as does the lengthening, I'm excited to get this going. The sooner it starts, the sooner it's over.

Thanks so much to everyone who called or emailed while I was in the hospital. I really appreciated all the love and well wishes.

Days until removal of the fixator: approximately 80