Allison and the Angry Inch

MOVE IT ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE

2007-10-31T06:16:00.000-07:00

I'm closing up shop. I might post in a few weeks to report on how my leg is feeling, but if this does turn out to be the last time I post, assume that all went well from here on out. Or that I'm dead. It'll be one of those two things.

If you were reading this blog because you were a friend and/or relative of mine blessed with two equal length legs, then thanks for your readership! I hope you found my months of agony entertaining.

If you came to this blog looking for information about leg lengthening, then I hope it's been helpful to you. Of course my experience was just that: my experience. Yours could be very different. That being said, on my final post, here's my list of 10 things I think would benefit anyone about to undergo leg lengthening:

1. Pick a good time to start the process. Really plan for the time off of work/school, and make sure that it's also a good time for anyone you might be needing to help you. Which leads me to...

2. You're going to need a caregiver. Someone falling into the "parent" or "person I'm married to" category would be preferable. Someone you are just dating might be a little iffy. Definitely don't think you can depend on a roommate to help you through it. Unless you feel comfortable asking your roommate to help you shower. Maybe you do.

3. Try to get as much help and support from your doctor as you can. I say "try" because it's not always possible with some doctors. Don't be afraid to call your doctor's answering service in the middle of the night.

4. Take all the pain medication that you need, but try not to take more than that. If you get addicted, you get addicted. Wean yourself off. Unless you have a problem with substance abuse, you will be able to regulate how much you need.

5. Pin site care. Your doctor will tell you one thing, you'll read many other things on the internet, but I found that the less I messed with them, the better. Just wash them in the shower with plain water, use sterile q-tips to dry them, and cover them with sterile gauze. And get yourself a shower seat. Trying to hose them down while standing up is not smart.

6. During the lengthening period, do your stretches. Everyday, all day. I know it hurts. But if you miss even one day you will feel it and it will only make things harder.

7. When you're on crutches, pad the tops of them with towels. Your armpits will still get sore, but not as bad. Being on crutches just sucks. Get off them as soon as you can.

8. You really can walk with the fixator without doing any damage to yourself. Walk as much as possible. Especially during the consolidation phase. Your bone will ache and you'll know it's growing.

9. Once the lengthening period is over, you won't be in pain at all. So go out and live your life. Just don't do anything stupid.

10. You're going to have bad days, and really bad days, and days where you want to shoot yourself in the head. You're also going to have good days. Just try to roll with it. It'll all be worth it in the end.

WOUNDS

2007-10-31T04:49:00.000-07:00

Bottom two pin site holes:

Top two pin site holes:

Knee screw removal site (with stitches):

Ankle screw removal site (with stitches):

FACTS, NOTHING BUT THE

2007-10-29T10:40:00.001-07:00

First surgery date: May 30th, 2007
Time spent in the hospital: 3 days, 2 nights
Begin date of lengthening: June 4, 2007
Duration of lengthening period: 24 days
Amount lengthened: one angry inch (2.54 centimeters)
Amount of work missed: 5 weeks
Duration of consolidation period before weight transfer: 76 days
Length of Vicodin withdrawal: 7 weeks
Second surgery date: October 24, 2007
Total duration of fixation: 148 days

I.V. BRUISE

2007-10-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

The picture doesn't really do it justice. It's much more green and red than the picture shows.

Today I'm feeling a lot more like myself, probably because I'm taking very little Vicodin. My fever spiked this afternoon, and after last June's fever incident//911 call/ER visit/verbal ass-whooping from my doctor, I knew that post-surgery fevers were normal so I just took some Tylenol and waited it out. I haven't tried much weight bearing since the surgery, but I'm going back to work on Monday so I'll inevitably try some then.

And I'm starting to count down until I get this tight ass bandage removed from my leg. 68 hours!

SURGERY IS COLD

2007-10-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my surgery to remove the four pins and two screws in my leg. Everything went fine, and I was home by 1pm. The worst part was how cold I was in the operating room and when I woke up. I couldn't stop shaking for an hour after the surgery. While I was waiting in the pre-op room before my surgery, I heard a little boy tell a little girl about what surgery is like. "Surgery is cold!" he said. Indeed, little boy, it is.

Here's me waiting to get all operated on:

Here's my leg ready to get de-pinned:

I'm not sure what I thought my leg would look like post-surgery, I suppose just a few bandages here and there, but I woke up and it was all wrapped up almost like a cast, and I was surprised that they didn't take it off before they sent me home. A call to my doctor confirmed that he won't be taking it off until my appointment with him next Tuesday. Which I suppose is fine. It's really tight and pretty uncomfortable, but I don't really want to see the carnage under there.

Here's a not very exciting picture of my mummy leg:

They gave me a prescription for Vicodin (hello old friend!) and at first I was reluctant to take it, but my leg hurts a significant amount. Not like the lengthening, just very sore and tender. I've been taking 1/2 a Vicodin every 4 or 5 hours, and that seems to be keeping the pain at bay. Hopefully by the end of the weekend the soreness will be much better.

And since there aren't any gory pictures of my wounds to show you, here's my bloody IV bandage:

IT'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!

2007-10-22T06:08:00.000-07:00

Only two days until surgery! Woohoo!

SERENDIPITOUS SYNERGY (OR SYNERGISTIC SERENDIPITY, WHICHEVER YOU PREFER)

2007-10-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

The universe conspired today to bring together me and the man whose movie informed the name of this blog, John Cameron Mitchell . He was in the elevator at my doctor's office! Tres meta.

I had my pre-surgery tests today. Nothing fancy... blood drawn, peed in the cup, yada yada yada. I thought maybe after going through almost five months of pin site cleaning, getting blood drawn wouldn't still bother me. But nope, I'm still a big wuss!

Only nine days left!

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

2007-10-14T09:45:00.001-07:00

The light at the end of the tunnel is shining brightly these days, as I'm only ten (10!) days away from pin removal surgery. And I'm starting now to reflect on how I spent the last four and half months, and how different it was than I thought it would be.

When I first decided to have leg lengthening surgery, the idea of months of inactivity didn't really phase me. Actually, it was somewhat the opposite. Being inordinately lazy by nature, I saw it as a free pass to spend the summer on my couch, watching TV and movies and reading books and magazines and just relaxing.

But as soon as the lengthening started, I realized that I wouldn't be doing any of those fun things. The pain led to the drugs, which led to a complete inability to focus on anything, even a TV show. Reading was out of the question. The TV was generally on, and it did help distract from the pain somewhat, but I couldn't really tell you what I watched during that time. I remember watching a lot of The Cosby Show, but that's because at least two cable channels play it pretty much all night long, and since I didn't really sleep for the four weeks of lengthening, it seemed to be on all the time.

The only other thing I could manage to do during the lengthening period was play a hand-held version of Tetris that my sister-in-law got me. I'm telling you, if you ever have to experience an extended period of pain, get yourself a Tetris game. There's something about the simplicity of the game that requires very little concentration but also at the same time keeps your mind engaged enough to distract from the pain you're experiencing.

During the lengthening period was when I got the most visitors, but since I was so drugged up, I couldn't really enjoy them or even interact with them very much. Someone told me once to spread out my visitors, and in retrospect that certainly seems like good advice, also because visitors really do tire you out, as silly as that sounds.

Toward the end of the lengthening period, my head started to clear a bit and I could focus enough to watch TV. This was probably because I was now addicted to Vicodin, so it wasn't making me as out of it as it used to. I was able to get in a couple of TV shows on DVD and a couple of movies before the lengthening period ended and the Vicodin withdrawal period began.

Even though June was technically the hardest month, because it was the lengthening month, I hope I never have to live a month like July ever again. In fact, I would take four Junes over just one July. The combination of having to go back to work after six weeks away, being on crutches, and going through Vicodin withdrawal made for some of the hardest days of my life.

Crutching around the apartment was one thing. Crutching around my office building was something else entirely. Never before did I realize how far away everything was. My arms were shot after just two days back at work. And on top of that, the Vicodin withdrawal, which I've gone into in much detail, was depleting any remaining strength I had. I went to bed every night at 7pm. Do you know how light it is outside at 7pm in the summer? July sucked.

By the end of July, though, I was almost off the Vicodin and almost off the crutches completely. I felt more like myself. I finally got my appetite back. I estimate that I lost about 15 pounds in the two months of being on pain medication and then going through withdrawal from that pain medication. Before the surgery I was a very healthy eater, but since I couldn't seem to eat anything during June and July, I started eating pretty much whatever I wanted, since I figured that if I wanted pancakes, I might as well eat them, since they might be the only thing I ate all day.

As a result, I gained back all the weight, and then some, during the month of August. I start eating better again in September, and if I can manage to not gain any more weight in the coming weeks of limited mobility after surgery, I will have gained only about five to seven pounds during this process, which is not so bad for four and half months of inactivity.

I think I was in too much pain in June and too tired in July to be depressed. That was the toughest part of August. I went six weeks without going to the doctor and seeing xrays to show me if my bone was growing as fast as it should. I had no idea if my bone was on track for a late October fixator removal, or if, because I was an adult, the process was going to take longer than even my doctor finally admitted to me it would take.

August is when my idea of what the leg lengthening process would be like came the most true. I watched a lot of TV, went through a lot of movies and even read some books. Whenever I wasn't at work, I just sat around my apartment and tried to relax. Going into the process, I thought August would be my last month, but now knowing that I had two and half more months left, at least, made August the most difficult month psychologically.

September was easier in all regards. I was usually able to get out of the house once on a weekend, even if it was just to have brunch in my neighborhood, and since I still had Fridays off from work, the three day weekends actually felt like enough time to rest up for four days of work. I even turned the TV off and starting spending most of my time planning for what I would do once the whole process was over. The list I came up with is below. I should post in a year and see how many of these things I actually wind up doing.

-take French lessons and go to Paris
-walk to and from work everyday
-do yoga
-transition to a mostly raw diet
-buy food primarily from farmer's markets
-buy a real piece of art for my apartment
-have an actual birthday party for myself
-visit our friends at their condo in Hawaii
-buy lots of cute new shoes that I don't have to worry about fitting a lift into!

Now that October is almost half over, and my surgery is coming up quickly, I'm feeling like I might actually make it out of this process alive. Though I feel physically and emotionally spent, I'm optimistic-- confident, even-- that in a just a few months, hopefully by the new year, it will all feel very much worth it.

GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE GOOD NEWS

2007-10-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

Well, this is a first. My doctor's appointment today could not have gone better. After staring at my xrays for way too long and driving me crazy in the process, my doctor announced that my leg was ready to be fixator-free! He pulled out a little wrench (the same one I used to do the lengthening) and took my fixator apart right there in his office!

He then re-assembled my fixator and kept it in case I do re-break my leg and he has to put it back on. I didn't think to ask him to hold it to see how much it weighed, and I'm now thinking that I'm probably not going to see it again if all goes well, but that's okay. I'm now without fixator!

Here's a picture of my leg without the fixator:

And here's a picture of my leg with Lamar for perspective:

The surgery to remove the four pins and two screws still in my leg will be on October 24th. He said the surgery takes about half an hour. Until then, he told me to be very careful with my leg. Walking is fine, but any side to side movement should be avoided. He said I might want to bring my crutches around with me for support, so I think I will do that.

I'm sure he'll give me more specific instructions after my surgery (one thing I have learned about my doctor, he does not like to look very far into the future), but it sounds like the six weeks of crutches following surgery will not be so bad, more like just having them there for support and taking it easy.

He also told me that, all in all, I did pretty well with this whole thing. Thanks jerkface!

Now I can begin the final countdown.

Days until complete fixator removal: 14

ACHY, BREAKY?

2007-10-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

As I am (hopefully) nearing the conclusion of my leg lengthening journey, I'm realizing that I haven't talked much at all about certain aspects of this process, and if this blog is to help others who are about to have leg lengthening, I should talk about those aspects in a little more detail.

One aspect of the process that has been present the entire time is the bone ache. And it's occurring to me to talk about it now, because ever since my doctor transferred all of the weight from my fixator to my bone, I've been having a lot of it.

The bone ache first started when the lengthening started. And it was horrible. It was the pain that needed the drugs, that kept me from sleeping, that never went away. It's hard to describe pain, but if you're about to have leg lengthening, the kind of pain you can expect is a deep bone ache that you can't do anything about.

But I will say that towards the end of the lengthening, the pain did seem to get a little better, so perhaps the pain is front-loaded in that way. My doctor did allude to something like that, and since my lengthening was only 3.5 weeks long, I might have not experienced the decrease in pain level that a person with a much longer lengthening period would.

Once the lengthening was over, the bone ache mostly went away. I would still have it a few times a day, but the intensity of it significantly decreased, and the sensation was almost comforting in a strange way. It felt like the bone was growing.

And now that the weight is fully on my bone, I'm experiencing much more bone ache. It's not back up to the level of intensity of the lengthening, but it's much more constant than it was during the consolidation period. And it's freaking me out. I know that if I were to actually break my bone, it wouldn't just ache a little and feel sore. I just hope that more achy doesn't mean possible breaky.

My doctor's appointment is one week from today. I'm excited at the idea that this could be my last week with the fixator. If he does take it off next week, I'll still have the pins, but maybe I'll actually be able to get a pair of jeans on over them!

TEARS OF A CLOWN

2007-09-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I should blog, but there's not really anything interesting to say. My next doctor's appointment is two weeks from today, and the closer it gets, the more I'm realizing just how important it is to me for it to go well.

And for it go well, the xrays need to show that my leg is ready for the fixator to come off. If they do show that my leg is ready, then my doctor will take off the fixator and schedule a surgery to remove the pins and the screws in my leg. If they don't show that my leg is ready, I will hear something along the lines of "see you in a month," at which point I might need to shoot myself in the forehead.

Even though I've tried very hard to reason with myself about how my life right now isn't how it will always be-- that I will, someday, get the fixator off and be able to walk around and play outside like the normal kids-- depression has definitely set in. I've just gotten used to life like this, and life like this is depressing.

Perhaps a big reason for the sudden melancholy is the fact that my friend Rex has set a wedding date, November 10th. The wedding is in Northern California, and aside from the fact that I don't have any vacation time left, I will probably/hopefully be having surgery a week or so before that. So I can't go. This brings the grand total of weddings I have missed because of my leg to four. Well, one of those I wasn't actually invited to, but I'm counting it anyway.

So I'm trying to think of things to be happy about. Like that The Office and Ugly Betty start up again this week. Or that the Red Sox might actually beat the Yankees and win the division. Can you tell that my life revolves around my television?

Here's a picture of my adorable niece with her adorable face:

A LITTLE LESS FIXATOR, A LOT MORE TIME

2007-09-19T06:47:00.000-07:00

Another doctor's appointment yesterday. He took off a small piece of my fixator, the piece that was used for the lengthening, so it was nice to see that bastard go. And he gave me the piece, so that bodes well for the will I get to keep my fixator question.

Here's the piece he took off:

He said that now my bone is effectively bearing all the weight and that the fixator isn't really doing anything anymore. And then he said "see you in a month." Um, what?

He wants to see how my leg does with the added stress, then take some xrays and decide if the fixator is ready to come off. He said if I was going crazy, I could come in for my next appointment in three weeks instead of four. So I scheduled it for three weeks.

Then I told him that I was going to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving, and asked him how that would impact my pin removal surgery. He said if he had his choice, he'd rather wait until after Thanksgiving. So I might be stuck with the pins for another two months! But, if all goes well in three weeks, he'll take off the fixator, then schedule the pin removal surgery for two weeks after that.

I have to admit, though, that I've gotten pretty comfortable with the fixator. I even took the subway for the first time this morning! And I'm also terrified of re-breaking my leg, so though two more months of fixation isn't my idea of a good time, I'm okay with it.

NOTE TO SELF: KILL DOCTOR

2007-09-11T14:55:00.000-07:00

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!

PLAYING FAVORITES

2007-09-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

You know how parents love some of their children more than their other children? That's because some children are good, whereas some are BAD BAD BAD!

Here are my good children:

Never any pus, never any pain, never any sticking of the gauze to the wound, never any problems. These are what healthy pin sites look like.

Now on to the trouble makers:

First of all, there's Screwy. He's actually a bit of a success story. After starting out in a life of crime, he's reformed himself and turned things around. He still bleeds every now and then, so the gauze sticks to him sometimes, and he produces little crusts that I have to swab off, but all in all, he's not such a bad seed anymore.

But Toppy, he's bad news. One infection apparently wasn't enough for him. He had to go and develop another one. The first one was on the bottom side of the pin. It took a long time to stop hurting like a biatch, but it eventually did, and around that time, pus showed up on the rim of the pin site. It was so crusted on that I couldn't get it off with the cotton swabs. Until now.

Here's Toppy after I got a huge wad of pus off of him:

I think that bottom of the pin site infection has finally run its course. Which is why I was very confused last week when my pin site starting hurting like a biatch again. Turns out the top of the pin site is now infected. It stings and burns, just like the other infection did, and it's already starting to form a crust.

Here we go again. Apparently pin sites closest to joints are more likely to get infected. So I guess Toppy was just born bad.

ANTIBIOTIC PARADE

2007-08-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

I developed a sinus infection a few weeks ago, and despite my determination to ignore it, it didn't go away. So on Monday I called my primary care physician and convinced her to prescribe me an antibiotic for it without coming in to see her. I felt a little guilty about playing up my leg situation for her, but this is my week off, and I'm not getting up off of the couch unless I absolutely have to.

She called in a prescription for Levaquin, which is vogue in sinus infection treatment these days. I swear she's prescribed it for me once before, and I didn't have any side effects then, but perhaps because I'm also taking Erthromycin for the pin site infection who will not die (which I forgot to mention to my doctor), I had crazy side effects this time.

Immediately after taking it, I felt tremendously dizzy and lightheaded. It was kind of like that very first Vicodin (oh, the memories!) After about two hours, the dizziness went away, but I was now wide awake. Like I was on speed wide awake. I tried to go to bed, but I just laid there, having bizarre thoughts, which I can't really describe other than to say that they didn't feel like thoughts I would have, but rather thoughts a crazy person would have.

So I was up until 4 in the morning, high on antibiotics. When I called my doctor the next day to get a different antibiotic, her receptionist tried to convince me that my side effects were only because I didn't eat enough food with it. But I did eat right before I took it. You have to eat a lot, she said. But it kept me up for hours and made me feel crazy! Okay, fine, she said, and finally put me on with my doctor.

My doctor apologized for the side effects. Yeah, that can happen with that drug, she said. Thanks for the warning! She prescribed me Augmentin, the name brand for Amoxicillin, which I have taken many times and have never had side effects from. I finally told her about the Erthromycin for the pin site infection, and she told me to check with my leg doctor to see if I didn't need to take both. And I checked with him, and he told me to take both.

So now I'm on a parade of antibiotics. Anything living in my body, good or bad, should be dead by the end of the week. And let's just hope that I'm not building up some sort of super immunity to antibiotics. I'm going to need them for when the bird flu comes.

THE PIN SITE WHO WOULD NOT DIE

2007-08-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

The pin site infection lives on. It was better, but not completely better, when I lowered my antibiotic dosage. So it decided to get bad again. Now it's getting better, again, and is producing all kinds of cool yellow pus.

You know you want to enlarge this picture:

TICK TOCK

2007-08-20T05:38:00.000-07:00

Nothing to do now but watch the clock. And watch movies. And read. And learn how to count to 100 in French. Pretty much anything to distract myself from the fact that I still have the fixator attached to my leg which, quite possibly because there's nothing else to obsess about now, I can't stop obsessing about.

During my pre-surgery internet searching, I came across a guy who had leg lengthening surgery who opted to have a rod put in his leg so that when the lengthening was over, the fixator was able to come off and the rod held his leg together while the bone healed. The guy had three months of lengthening, which I cannot even imagine, but he said that after three months of the wearing the fixator, he was ready to yank it off himself.

That's about the point I'm at, too. But I'm hoping that my next doctor's appointment on September 11 will be encouraging. I'll have been done with the lengthening for two and a half months by then. How much more time does my stupid bone need to grow?

Kelly's mom and sister came over for dinner last week. Here they are, with Kelly's mom covering her face since she doesn't want her picture on this crazy interweb thing that's all the rave with the kids these days:

And here's a picture of me, Kelly, and He Who Shall Remain Nameless (I decided my fixator doesn't deserve a cute name like Frank) at Heather's housewarming party last weekend:

OFF THE STICKS, OFF THE SMACK

2007-08-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

It's been over 60 hours since I have had any Vicodin, which is the longest I've gone in my quest to rid my body of the drug. The withdrawal symptoms over that time haven't been too horrible, so I think I am finally, officially off the smack!

It's really a toss-up which was worse: the lengthening pain, or the Vicodin withdrawal. The lengthening lasted about four weeks. The Vicodin withdrawal lasted a month and a half. I certainly couldn't have gotten through the lengthening without the Vicodin, but it seems like a terrible trade-off. My advice to anyone undergoing a long stint with pain is to take as little pain medication as possible, and watch out for that tolerance point. That's when you know you're in trouble.

Also, I've been off of the crutches for over a week now. The progress of this week has been rather remarkable. I started out the week off the crutches, but still walking very awkwardly and tentatively, and trying to limit my walking as much as possible. Now my walk is almost normal looking, and I find myself getting up to get things that in the past I would have either asked someone to get me or just lived without.

And after almost two weeks of increased antibiotics, my pin site infection has cleared up, and now I know that any pain I experience around my pin sites is the beginnings of an infection. It took me a week to realize that I had one because I thought the pain I was having was dry skin pain, not infection pain, and in that time the infection got worse. So hopefully, knowing what I know now, I won't get an infection this bad again.

So now my only concerns are taking care of my pin sites, walking as much as possible, building up my strength and trying to get back to my normal life. Last night was the first time in two months that I've left the apartment for a reason other than a doctor's appointment or to go to work. We went to Heather and Jessie's housewarming party, taking a cab both ways and only staying for a couple of hours, but just sitting in a chair in their backyard wiped me out.

But it felt good to do something normal again, and with the pace of my progress lately, I'm hoping for more social outings in the coming weeks. It's going to be a slow road back to a normal life, but at least now it's starting to feel like I've finally begun that journey.

Oh, and one of my new co-workers told me last week that Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer, had leg lengthening surgery! Here's a picture of the freak like me:

And here's what his Wikipedia page has to say about it:

Cuomo was born with his left leg 44 mm (1 3/4 in) shorter than his right leg. After the success of The Blue Album, Cuomo underwent a procedure to correct the condition. This involved the surgical breaking of the bone in his leg, followed by several months of wearing a steel brace which required self-administered "stretching" of the leg 4 times daily; Cuomo likened the ordeal to "crucifying (his) leg". An x-ray of the leg is part of the album art for "The Good Life" single, and the experience inspired him to write the song. Cuomo can be seen wearing the brace on an episode of The Late Show with David Letterman, which can be found on their DVD "Video Capture Device".

FRANKIE SAYS RELAX

2007-08-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

I suppose "Frank" is the winner of the name that fixator contest. Personally I'd rather call it "that thing that's getting removed at the end of August like my doctor originally promised me," but that's no longer factually accurate.

Of course I can see on the xrays that my bones are nowhere near healed, and of course I can understand that it's going to take two more months, at least, for them to be ready to stand on their own.

But what I can't understand is why my doctor didn't know that before we started this whole thing. The only other option is that he did and he just straight out lied to me. Like he lied to me about how much the lengthening was going to hurt. Hm, I'm starting to see a pattern here...

Since there's not much that I can do about it at this point, I'm just trying to relax and plan out what I want to do with myself for the next two months plus.

We rented Shortbus on Saturday, and the chick at the video store asked Kelly if she knew what it was, then told her it really belonged in the adult section.

Which it probably does. It's front-loaded with sex acts, perhaps solely to shock and jar, and because you aren't yet emotionally invested in the characters, it is indeed shocking and jarring, but as the film goes on and you start to become more emotionally invested in the characters, the sex acts somehow seem less shocking and more just part of the narrative. It's not as good as Hedwig but I think it's worth a viewing for fans of Hedwig. Or fans of porn.

After trying to rent Weeds from the same video store, and having it already be checked out, and then being left with nothing to watch except the horrible War of the Worlds on HBO (really, there's not one redeeming thing about that movie), I finally decided to get Netflix.

Weeds is apparently shipping to me today. I've added Battlestar Galatica and a few random movies to my queue, but I need suggestions, and lots of them, for two more months of viewing.

Help, please.

STILL LIFE WITH FIXATOR

2007-07-31T13:09:00.001-07:00

I went into my doctor's appointment today with very low expectations. I was only hoping to get some sense of when I'd get my fixator off. And get some sense of it I did.

My next doctor's appointment isn't until September 11th. So that's 42 more days of life with fixator before my doctor and I are even going to discuss taking it off.

It's a bit of a shock, since I really thought it'd be off by the end of August, or early September at the latest. Now it's looking like the end of September will be the earliest surgery date, because there are still a few steps in between my September 11th visit and getting the fixator removed.

The next step is transferring some of the weight bearing from the fixator to my bone. My doctor might do this on the September 11th visit, or he might still think it's too soon. Once the weight is transferred, we wait... I don't know how long.

Then when my doctor thinks my bone is ready, he'll take the fixator off, but leave the pins in. This is in case I re-break my leg right away. If I'm not broken after a couple of weeks, he'll take the pins out.

So realistically, I'm looking at mid-October before I'm appliance-free. Since it's going to be living on my leg for another two and half months, I think it's time I named my fixator. Any suggestions?

SMACK REPORT

2007-07-29T06:54:00.000-07:00

I'm down to one and a half Vicodin a day. At this rate, the weaning process will be over in one week, with next Sunday being my last day on the smack.

The weaning process I chose was to go down half a pill every three days. At one point in the lengthening, I was taking eight Vicodin a day. After the horrible failure of trying to quit cold turkey, I went back up to six Vicodin a day and started my weaning process there.

The withdrawal symptoms have been ever-present, and have ranged from mild to moderate. Here are all the possible Vicodin withdrawal symptoms:

-Restlessness
-Muscle pain
-Bone pain
-Insomnia
-Diarrhea
-Vomiting
-Cold flashes
-Goose bumps
-Involuntary leg movements
-Watery eyes
-Runny nose
-Sneezing
-Loss of appetite
-Irritability
-Yawning
-Nausea
-Chills
-Sweating

Except for vomiting, I've had them all to varying degrees. The restlessness has been the constant, most prominent symptom, followed closely by the stomach issues, with the weird cold-like symptoms coming in a close third.

It's funny how the weaning process is also called "stepping down," because it really has felt like walking down a flight of stairs. Certain steps were steep, and the withdrawal symptoms were intense, like, for some reason, when I went from four pills to three and a half. At other times, I felt like I was on a plateau, with only mild withdrawal symptoms for days at a time.

Now that I'm almost off the Vicodin, my symptoms seem to be more of the irritability, insomnia and involuntary leg movement variety. One night this past week I couldn't fall asleep for the life of me, and last night I fell asleep okay, but woke up at 2:00 a.m. unable to stop moving my legs back and forth. And I've been ornery as hell, irritated by every little thing about this leg lengthening process that hadn't irritated me before.

I've read that after you're off the Vicodin completely, withdrawal symptoms last for about another week. So hopefully in two weeks, I'll be symptom free!

THE MINORS

2007-07-27T05:40:00.000-07:00

Most of the major concerns I had going into this surgery are now behind me. The pain of the lengthening, the worry about nerve damage, and the fear that my bone wouldn't grow are all non-issues now. The only major concern that remains is that when I do get my fixator off, I don't re-break my leg immediately.

But the minor concerns are still hanging around, namely the ankle swelling and the pin site discomfort.

I can't seem to keep my ankle swelling down for any length of time. The minute I'm not elevating it, it comes back. And when I'm at work, it's impossible to keep it elevated all the time. Also the more I walk on it, the more swollen it gets. My physical therapist told me that as I walk more and more, my ankle swelling will dissipate. That hasn't been the case yet, but I'm still not walking anywhere near normally, so hopefully once I do, the ankle swelling won't be an issue.

And my pins sites, though generally healthy, are still causing problems from time to time.

Here's a picture of my top two pin sites:

If you really want to get a good look at the sites, click on the picture to enlarge it. You can see some yellow looking stuff in the corner of the one on the left, which is the top pin site. Right now my top pin site is very stingy in that area, so I've upped my antibiotics to four a day for two days to prevent an infection from developing.

I've been using Bacitracin around my top two pin sites to help with the painfully dry skin, but it doesn't seem to be helping. I tried some A&D ointment around the area, and that helped, but my skin also turned red after a few days. How something used to treat diaper rash could have given me a rash, I don't know, but I guess I can't continue to use it now.

Here are my bottom two pin sites:

They have been pretty much fine this entire time. I haven't had the dryness or stinging and itching around them that I have with my top two pin sites. I have no idea why that is, but I'll take it.

Mia and her mom, Jenny, came by for a lovely little visit the other night. Here's a picture of them and their cute haircuts:

Jenny has been through her own orthopedic surgery and recovery ordeal, so it's been great to have her experience and wise advice helping me along the way. Also she brought me flowers and apple cider from the Union Square farmer's market. Mia brought me a vintage Playboy magazine. There's not a boob to be found anywhere in it. It's full of like, articles, and stuff. Boo!

IT'S ALIVE!

2007-07-25T06:17:00.000-07:00

I took my first unassisted steps yesterday! I pretty much looked like Frankenstein, with my arms out in front of me for balance and my steps heavy and awkward.

But sweet Jesus it felt good. And I'm feeling pretty good in general. Every day I feel a little stronger and like I have a little bit more energy. I'm starting to feel like myself again, and am only now realizing how out of it and somewhat depressed I was this whole time.

I have my focus back, which I didn't totally realize was gone. During the lengthening, I couldn't even focus enough to watch TV. Now I'm starting to go through the stacks of DVDs I collected for my recovery.

We just finished watching The Office (American version) seasons 1&2, which were awesome. I don't think there's a bad episode in the bunch. Neither Casino Royale nor Little Children lived up to the hype for me, but I thought both were solid. And my guilty pleasure confession is that we've been watching reruns of The O.C. on SoapNet. Maybe one day soon I'll even pick up a book!

I'm starting to feel like my daily experience is now what I envisioned it would be when I signed up for this surgery. I'm tired all the time, my leg is sore, physical therapy is hard, living with the fixator is uncomfortable, but it's all managable. I'm still needing 10-11 hours of sleep a night, but I'm getting through the days okay.

My parents just booked a 7-day, western Caribbean family cruise for all of us for next April. The last family cruise we went on was two years ago, and my back pain was so bad that I couldn't do a lot of things I wanted to do. Just knowing that I'll be back pain free for this one makes this whole thing already seem worthwhile.

Oh, and I got a care package from Sheila yesterday... thanks Shix!

THE MOST EXPENSIVE THING I'VE EVER OWNED

2007-07-20T07:48:00.001-07:00

I got my hospital bill the other day, from the Hospital for Joint Diseases and Orthopaedic Intitute (sic). I wonder how many reams of stationery they printed up before they noticed that typo.

My total bill comes to $35,132.75. Through the miracle of health insurance, my portion is only $250.00.

Here's the breakdown of the charges:

Two days in a semi-private room: $4,820.00
Pharmacy: $113.75
Medical Supplies: $958.00
Other Supplies: $900.00
X-Rays: $258.00
Operating Room Services: $7,500.00
Anesthesia: $795.00
Physical Therapy: $109.00
Drugs: $32.00
Recovery Room: $1,050.00

That comes to $16,535.75. So the remaining $18,597? That's the price of my fixator!

I had toyed with the idea of asking my doctor if I can keep the fixator after he takes it off. Knowing how expensive it is, I can't imagine I'll be allowed to now. Though on the other hand, I did buy it. Well, my insurance company bought it. So technically, it's mine. Maybe I will be able to keep the most expensive thing I've ever owned.

Maybe I can trade it in for a car.

SEVEN WEEK ITCH

2007-07-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

Today is seven weeks since my surgery. Seven weeks of wearing the fixator. Seven weeks of being on crutches. Seven weeks of hair growth on my right leg.

I'm feeling a distinct seven week itch. I alternate between feeling like it'd be okay that I have the fixator if only I could walk, and feeling like it'd be okay if I couldn't walk if only I didn't have the fixator. Essentially, I'm sick of having the fixator and I'm sick of not being able to walk.

There's some promising progress on the walking front, though. Yesterday in physical therapy I rocked some serious one crutch walking, and for the first time felt like someday it will be possible to walk unaided again.

But I bummed myself out by looking at my xrays, which show such huge gaps in my bones that I'm starting to realize that this fixator ain't coming off anytime soon. My doctor says that he's in "no rush" to take it off, and I agree with him, in principle. I certainly don't want it taken off before my bone is completely healed. Re-breaking my leg would be beyond horrible.

At my next doctor's appointment in two weeks, my doctor is going to transfer some of the weight off of my fixator and onto my bone. Right now the fixator is bearing all of the weight while the bone consolidates.

Once the bone is completely healed, my doctor said he'll take off the fixator, but leave the pins in my leg. In the sweet Jesus don't let this happen case that I re-break my leg, he can just slip the fixator back on over the pins.

If after one or two weeks of having only the pins in my leg and no breakage, he'll remove the pins. So I'm looking at the end of the summer at the earliest before I'm free of all the metal. About another seven weeks. Which puts me at the mid-way point of this whole process. That's a somewhat depressing thought. At least the worst is behind me!

Vicodin addiction update: I'm down to 3.5 pills a day, and I'm really starting to feel the effects of the weaning process. The last few nights I've been incredibly restless and it's been very hard to sleep. I'm sneezing a lot and generally feel like I have a cold. But once I take a Vicodin, the sneezing goes away almost immediately. I don't even feel anything when I take a Vicodin, I just feel normal again. That's some messed up shit.

TRYING TO LOSE A CRUTCH OR TWO

2007-07-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has ever been on crutches knows, being on crutches sucks. Just from crutching around my office for three days last week, I exhausted my arms so much that I could barely lift them the following few days. But I'm hoping that now that the initial soreness has decreased, it won't get this bad again.

So now the goal is to get off of the crutches. I've made it down to one crutch... for a few steps at a time, that is. But it's progess! I was having some pretty bad knee pain during physical therapy, but after talking to my doctor about it, and getting the "it's nothing" speech, I've been pushing through it and it seems to be okay.

And the more I weight bear, the more aches and pains I have in my leg, which strangely enough makes me feel better about my knee pain. All my muscles, and soft tissues, etc., have all stretched an inch in only three weeks, so it makes sense that they would feel tight and painful as I try to put weight on them.

I have my next doctor's appointment on July 31st, and I want to walk into it, without crutches. I admit that this is mostly because I know my doctor will yell at me if I walk in with crutches, but hey, I'll take the extra motivation wherever I can find it.

Finally, here's an xray of my leg:

You can see the break in the tibia and the break in the fibula, each an inch wide, and the new bone that's already starting to grow in. You can also see the two screws, one at my ankle and one at my knee, and the four pins that go practically entirely through my tibia. It still grosses me out to see that. Eesh.

Here's an xray of both my legs as I'm standing up:

This is the xray he used to measure my leg lengths and determine that the lengthening is over. You can really see in this xray that my right knee is now higher than my left knee. You can't tell at all, though, by just looking at me. It's really only 1/2 an inch higher than the left and isn't noticable at all, so I was suprised to see how much it showed up in the xray.

BAD BLOGGER

2007-07-11T06:10:00.000-07:00

I've been horrible about blogging. Part of it is not my fault, since we're still without internet at home. Or rather, we sometimes have internet, and then only certain pages will open. They are finally supposed to fix it on Saturday, after almost a month. Die a slow death, Time Warner Cable.

I've also been beyond exhausted, since this week is my first week back to work. Even though I've been crutching around the apartment for over a month, the amount of crutching I've had to do at work, which is only to get to and from the bathroom, has destroyed my arms. My left arm feels like it's going to fall off. It hasn't been this sore since that one (and only) boxing class I took years ago.

But I did have a doctor's appointment yesterday, and my lengthening is officially done! My legs are even!

Check it out:

Now I just have to wear the fixator until my new bone grows and consolidates. I go back to the doctor in three weeks for another set of xrays, and hopefully about three weeks after that, I'll be fixator free!

For some reason, the nurse gave us my xrays from this recent doctor's visit, so I'm going to try to take pictures of them and post them, hopefully on Saturday when our FUCKING INTERNET IS FIXED!

Not much is going on otherwise. Still weaning myself off of the Vicodin like the addict that I am. We had a mouse in the apartment this morning. Kelly tried to trap it and kill it, while I sat helplessly on the couch and watched, but she only managed to stun it with a broom before it scurried behind a bookcase. We duck-taped it back there until our super could come over and kill it proper.

Here's a picture of Lamar playing on my fixator:

BACK ON THE SMACK

2007-07-04T06:37:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I am finally, after five and half weeks, and two weeks later than I had planned, going back to work. I was supposed to go back to work on Monday. And I was completely ready to. My leg lengthening was done. My physical therapy was going great, and my leg didn't hurt at all. And because it didn't hurt at all, I stopped taking the Vicodin.

Here's another bit of information to add to the list of information I sure wish my doctor had bothered to tell me: stopping Vicodin cold turkey is about the worst thing that you can do to your body.

First it started out like flu symptoms. Stomach ache, coughing, sneezing, fever, chills and sweats. I thought I had somehow managed to get sick just as I was supposed to go back to work. Then my stomach got much, much worse.

At some point over the weekend, as I was hovering near death in the bathroom, it occurred to me that maybe instead of the stomach flu, I was going through Vicodin withdrawal.

I emailed my doctor (still on vacation, mind you) about my withdrawal. He wrote back that I should have stepped down my dosage instead of quitting cold turkey. Hey, thanks for the information!

By then, I was so deep into my withdrawal that I thought it couldn't get any worse. So I figured, with all I had already been through, that I might as well not take any more Vicodin and just tough it out.

And then it got worse. I don't want to get too graphic, but it was like fire coming out of me. Because of the time difference, I couldn't call my doctor. So we called Kelly's brother-in-law's father, who is an ER doctor. He told me to take a Vicodin. So I did.

Then we called Markus, soon to be MD, PhD, and he helped us figure out if I could take some Immodium, since the pharmacist at Duane Reade suggested to Kelly that in combination with my antibiotic it could be potentially fatal. Oh, let's not be dramatic or anything, Duane Reade pharmacist.

Markus busted out his pharmacology textbook and assured us that I would not, in fact, die if I took some Immodium. So take some I did, and in about an hour and a half of taking that and the Vicodin, I started to feel a little better. I took a couple more Vicodin overnight, and by the morning I felt like life might be worth living again.

So, I'm officially addicted to Vicodin. I now have myself on a step down program (aided in part by advice Kelly found on a Vicodin addicts online forum) which has me decreasing my dosage by half a pill every three days until I'm off of it. Which will be around the end of July.

I could really care less what my doctor thinks of this plan. No way am I going through these symptoms again. Don't do drugs, kids. Those movies like The Basketball Diaries and Trainspotting ain't lying.

Oh, and Heather came by on Friday night for a visit, which turned out to be right before all this madness started to happen. Here she is pointing to the beautiful handmade "Happy End of Lengthening" card she made me:

UM, WHAT?

2007-06-28T06:28:00.001-07:00

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.

CUT OFF FROM CIVILIZATION

2007-06-27T07:32:00.000-07:00

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!

DOES THIS FIXATOR MAKE MY ANKLE LOOK FAT?

2007-06-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

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

SURGERY WHILE AWAKE

2007-06-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

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.

TIGHT JOINTS

2007-06-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

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.

HOUSE OF PAIN

2007-06-15T10:08:00.001-07:00

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. :(

SPONGE WORTHY

2007-06-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

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:

MORE ANGRY, LESS OF AN INCH

2007-06-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

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.

MORE DRUGS, LESS LENGTHENING

2007-06-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

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.

DAILY 2 A.M. BLOG POST

2007-06-08T22:56:00.000-07:00

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.

AN UNEVENTFUL DAY, FINALLY

2007-06-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

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

NOT QUITE A MEDIEVAL TORTURE DEVICE, BUT CLOSE

2007-06-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

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

MY FIRST 911 CALL

2007-06-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

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

HOME SWEET JESUS MY LEG IS BROKEN

2007-06-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

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

SEE YOU ON THE FLIP SIDE

2007-05-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, my best friend Claudia and her husband are coming to town for the day before they head up to Connecticut. Then later in the day, Kelly and I are training it to Philadelphia to spend the rest of the holiday weekend with her mom, sisters, and grandmother (now 75% more gay-friendly!).

So I'm signing off for now. Kelly might guest blog for me while I'm in the hospital, but if not, I'll be back on sometime around June 2nd. If anyone wants to visit me, either in the hospital, or when I'm back home, call my cell phone or Kelly's cell phone, she'll have both with her.

Wish me luck!

Days until surgery: 5

I THOUGHT YOU SAID IN HAITI

2007-05-22T05:03:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to the main NYU hospital to give a unit of blood for my surgery. The hospital is so huge, and looks like a hotel, with all its amenities. As Kelly said, "it even has a stamp machine, we'd never have to leave!"

Kelly volunteered to donate a unit of her own blood, too. She donates blood often, because her blood type is O positive, aka the universal donor, and also because she's a good person. Since I'm not a good person, this experience was entirely new to me.

First they checked our iron levels with blood from pricking our fingers. Kelly kept failing the test, so they had to keep pricking her fingers. She wound up with many bloody fingers.

I couldn't stop laughing at the list of questions they ask you during the interview, mostly because I couldn't stop thinking about this Sarah Silverman episode. I can't figure out how to post a video, so you're just going to have to follow the link and trust me that it's hilarious.

When we finally got in the chairs to give blood, Kelly's veins turned out to be "beautiful", and the technician had no problem inserting the needle. Me, they needed all three technicians to find a vein.

When the needle went in, I knew immediately it was going to take some digging around to actually find the vein. So dig they did, with the needle, until it felt like they were coming out on the other side of my arm.

At this point, Kelly's almost done, her blood flowing out of her like some sort of waterfall. Once they finally found a vein on me, my blood flow more closely resembled a dying river.

"Squeeze tight," they told me, of the squishy foam thing in my hand. That didn't work. "Now try squeezing tight, then releasing." Still nothing. "Now just release."

About twenty minutes later, they had enough blood and it was over. Kelly got a free movie pass because she was a volunteer. I got nothing because I was only there for my own selfish behalf.

At least, I thought, if they don't use my blood for my surgery, then someone else can use it. Nope. They toss it. They must have some sort of good reason for that, but I don't know what it is.

They told me I was going to have a nasty bruise, but nothing has appeared so far. If one does, I'll be sure to post a picture of it.

Days until surgery: 8

SMALL WORLD

2007-05-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I randomly met my surgeon's daughter. She happens to be very good friends with someone I work with, and was in the office having lunch with him. She talked with me about her father for a while, about his "drinking problem," which she says is much better now, despite his constantly shaking hands. Oh, that's just hilarious.

But she told me something I didn't know, which is that my surgeon trained with the inventor of the current, now standard, method of limb lengthening. Which makes my surgeon 1) older than I thought and 2) very well trained.

Tonight I go to give a unit of my own blood for my surgery. I guess with the blood bank shortages, this is standard practice now. I've never given blood before (I know, I know, I'm a horrible person), so it should be an experience. Perhaps I'll also finally learn my blood type.

Days until surgery: 9

PRE-SURGERY TESTS

2007-05-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

I had my pre-surgery tests this morning. I had them done at the hospital where I’m having my surgery instead of at my doctor’s office, and it turned out to be a good choice because I was able to do all the registration paperwork today instead of on the day of the surgery.

The only “tests” they did to me, though, were to take my blood pressure and a blood sample. I thought the tests would be more extensive, with at least some sort of heart monitoring, but I guess not.

They did ask me about a million questions, everything ranging from what type of alcohol I drink to what time of day I take my multi-vitamin. And I was asked all these questions three different times, first by the physician’s assistant, then by a nurse, then by the anesthesiologist. They were all really nice, though, and all wished me luck on my surgery.

It started to dawn on me, as the nurse was drawing blood out of my arm and I had my head turned away from the sight of it, as I always do when I get blood drawn, that I was going to need to seriously toughen up soon.

Days until surgery: 12

DOING MY PART TO WARM THE GLOBE

2007-05-17T06:25:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend we bought an air conditioner for the living room. Generally, I’m anti-air conditioning units. The ice cold air blowing out of them feels eerily unnatural, and you just know how horrible it is for the environment. Plus it makes my throat dry.

We’ve kept a window-A/C in the bedroom the last few summers because though I’ve tried, I’ve found it impossible to sleep without one during the months of July and August. It’s just too hot.

But the thought of spending the summer inside my apartment has forced me to swallow my anti-A/C rhetoric and pony up for a Freon-spewing beast for the living room, too.

Before heading to P.C. Richards to sell out, we measured our living room to determine how many BTUs we’d need in our new A/C. I was somewhat shocked to learn that our living room is maybe 250 square feet. It feels much larger than that to me.

We measured the rest of the apartment, and it’d be generous to call it 400 square feet total. I guess the fact that my first bedroom in Manhattan was around 80 square feet has skewed my perception of what constitutes a large room.

At any rate, here’s a handy square footage to BTU conversion chart for anyone looking to buy an A/C this summer:

100 to 150 square feet = 5,000 BTUs
150 to 250 square feet = 6,000 BTUs
250 to 300 square feet = 7,000 BTUs
300 to 350 square feet = 8,000 BTUs
350 to 400 square feet = 9,000 BTUs
400 to 450 square feet = 10,000 BTUs
450 to 550 square feet = 12,000 BTUs
550 to 700 square feet = 14,000 BTUs
700 to 1,000 square feet = 18,000 BTUs
1,000 to 1,400 square feet = 24,000 BTUs

And if you're planning to buy an A/C, do it now. They are super cheap. We got this 10,000 BTU A/C for only $250. I’m sure that on the first hot day of the summer, prices will double.

Days until surgery: 13

MY ABS HURT TOO

2007-05-16T06:34:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I decided that I wanted to start a modified exercise routine. My thinking was that I would do it throughout the summer, along with whatever knee and ankle exercises I need to do as part of my physical therapy.

Since I’ll be wearing the external fixator all summer, I built the routine around exercises that I can do on a mat on the floor of my apartment. So it’s mostly arm and ab work, with a little bit of yoga.

I started it on Sunday, thinking that if I do it everyday until the surgery, it would become a habit and therefore easier to resume doing after the surgery. What I didn’t anticipate is how freaking sore it would make me.

It’s very humbling to go from being able to do hundreds of crunches a day just a few years ago (okay, seven years ago), to being so incredibly sore from doing one set of leg raises.

Also, whatever ability to do push-ups I once had is now gone. I can barely eek out ten, and that’s on my knees!

I’ve been mostly inactive the last couple of years because of my back pain. But I hadn’t realized just how out of shape I’d become. It’s going to be a long road to getting back into shape, especially when I add in all the rehab I’m going to be doing for my leg.

But I’m making a commitment to myself right now that from here on out, daily exercise is going to be a part of my life.

Days until surgery: 14

MY FOOT HURTS

2007-05-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

My right foot is hurting a lot lately, and it’s reminding me of yet another reason to have this surgery. Currently, I wear a half inch thick lift in my right shoe to make up half of the distance between my leg lengths. This helps somewhat with the back pain, because it keeps my pelvis sort of in place instead of allowing it to drop down completely.

Here’s the lift I wear:

It’s called the Clearly Adjustable lift. Its best quality is that it’s made of hard plastic, meaning that unlike foam or rubber lifts, it’ll never compress or flatten over time and will always be a half an inch thick.

Its major downside is that, as hard plastic, it’s really freaking hard. It’s killing my heel from how hard it is, even though I wear a foam insole over it to cushion it.

The only shoe the lift will fit into are my high backed New Balance sneakers. Now, I love my New Balances. I have no problem wearing them. But it’s not like I can wear New Balances everyday for the rest of my life.

Another problem of wearing such a high lift is that it’s kind of like wearing a high heel, in that your foot is slanted upward. I only wear high heels to weddings, and then I’m usually drunk, so my foot was certainly not used to the high heel effect. The tendons along the bottom of my foot have become extremely sore. I hope I haven't done permanent damage to them.

So there is one definite upside to this surgery: I get to throw the stupid lift away! Yay!

Days until surgery: 15

ADDENDUM: I had lunch with my friend Heather today in the park. It was significant.

Here's a picture of Heather:

SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION

2007-05-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

I’m starting to think now about any supplements I might want to take and dietary changes I might want to make after my surgery.

I already take 500 mg of calcium everyday, just to supplement the calcium in my diet, but I’m going to increase it to 1,500 mg per day. This is obviously to support bone health.

I already take a multi-vitamin, but I might take some additional vitamin C to boost my immune system. Since I’ll have open wounds on my leg for three months, I’m thinking that keeping a strong immune system will be essential to staving off infection. Along those same lines, I might take 30 mg of zinc a day, which aside from strengthening the immune system also apparently promotes cell regeneration and growth.

I’m a little more uncertain about other supplements I’ve read about, or been advised to take. Comfrey and symphytum promote healing, but seem to be somewhat controversial, and there’s an FDA warning about them and their possible harmful effects.

The biggest change I’m planning to my diet will be the inclusion of more protein. As a vegetarian, I don’t eat very much animal protein. Aside from a little bit of cheese everyday, I’m practically vegan. I’m not a huge fan of eggs, but I’m going to try to include at least egg whites in my diet everyday. I think the extra animal protein will be essential in growing and healing my new bone.

There are some big no-no’s health wise that I need to avoid. On the don’ts list is smoking, which impedes bone growth, so much so that the lengthening process can be almost twice as long for smokers as nonsmokers. I don’t smoke, so no problem there.

Ibuprofen is another don’t, it also impedes bone growth. So no Advil, no Motrin, no Aleve. I assume my pain pills will be more than sufficient for whatever pain I’m having, so this shouldn’t be a problem either.

My doctor also told me absolutely no drinking. Though when I pressed him on it, he said one drink every once in a while is fine. I assumed from that response that the main reason for the no drinking rule is that one could fall down or do some other sort of damage to oneself while drunk. Since I don’t want to be a moron, I’ll probably avoid drinking, too. Sad for me.

I’m also to avoid lakes, oceans, beaches, rivers, and ponds like the plague. My doctor tried to explain to me the infections he’s seen resulting from these bodies of water, but then he stopped and said, “Just don’t go anywhere near them!” Okay, doc. Calm down. Jesus.

Pools are okay, because the chlorine kills any living organisms that might be floating around in the water, but I’m probably going to avoid them too, just to be safe.

I know some of you have had surgeries/injuries before, so if you have any advice on supplements or dietary changes I should be thinking about, let me know!

Days until surgery: 16

A FEW GOOD TV SHOWS

2007-05-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

I’m looking for a few good TV shows that I can rent on DVD to get me through the summer. Below is a list of shows I’ve already seen all the way through, some of them more than once. Some of them more times than I’m comfortable admitting.

So let me know if you have any suggestions! But no Lost. I refuse to get into a show that plans to drag itself out into 2010.

• The Sopranos
• Six Feet Under
• Sex and the City
• Rome
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Angel
• Freaks & Geeks
• Nip/Tuck
• The Office
• Arrested Development
• Seinfeld
• Friends

Days until surgery: 19

PLEASE TO ENJOY: SOME LINKS

2007-05-10T06:43:00.000-07:00

I’ve added a links section. Just a few to start with. I’ll probably add more as I come across them. For those of you interested in the process of limb lengthening, or in seeing pictures of people much more messed up than myself, these are for you.

Those with strong stomachs should be sure to check out the Hospital for Special Surgery’s “Before & After Photos” page. There are some gnarly pictures on there. Yeesh.

Days until surgery: 20

WE CAN REBUILD HIM. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY.

2007-05-09T07:28:00.000-07:00

Leg lengthening, or distraction osteogenesis, as I like to call him, is not really leg lengthening so much as it is leg growing. Here’s how it works:

The bone (in my case, my right tibia) is surgically split into two segments, and then the two ends of the bone are gradually moved apart slowly enough so that new bone can form in the gap. At the same time, all the soft tissues and stuff surrounding the bone expands too. The result is a longer leg (or arm, or toe, or jaw bone, or middle finger).

This is all done using an external fixator to create tension stress. This Russian dude name Gavril Ilizarov came up with this technique, so they named the fixator after him.

But I’m not getting the Ilizarov fixator, pictured below:

I’m getting a monolateral fixator:

Doesn’t that look much less scary than the Ilizarov?

There was also an option of having a metal rod put in my leg with an automatic timer of some sort that lengthens the leg at regular intervals, but that’s complication prone, and my doctor said that for my amount of lengthening, would be too unnecessarily risky. He’s the doctor, so I listened to him.

Apparently I’ll be turning little knobs on the fixator a few times a day, which is what will pull the bone apart. The fixator will be attached to my leg via pins drilled into my bone through my skin.

One of the biggest elements of the process will be pin site care. The most common complication of limb lengthening is pin site infections. I’ll have to clean the pin sites very carefully everyday in order not to get infections. If I do get a pin site infection, I have to take antibiotics. If the infection gets bad, and travels to the bone, I have to get on serious IV antibiotics. So let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

Through all kinds of tests and trials, they’ve found that bone should grow no more than 1 millimeter per day. An inch is 2.54 centimeters. There are 10 millimeters in one centimeter. So I’ll be lengthening for about one month.

When the aimed length has been reached (in my case, one angry inch), a consolidation phase follows. Meaning I’ll still be wearing the external fixator, but I won’t be lengthening anymore. It’ll just be there to support my bone as it heals.

I’ll be doing lots of physical therapy to make sure I keep my knee and ankle mobility. I might get some sort of motion machine that does the work for me. I’m also apparently going to get something to wear at night that stimulates healing via electric pulses. Essentially, I’m going to half-machine.

The consolidation phase is supposed to last about two months. So after about three months in total, I’ll get to take the fixator off. That’s a quick, out-patient procedure, but I’ll have to go back on crutches for a few weeks afterward, just to be safe, and then take it easy for a while after that, in order not to re-fracture my bone.

Is all this going to hurt? Yeah, probably a lot. I’ll have pain killers. I’m not too worried about it, though. I have a pretty high pain tolerance. Though if I’m whining on here in a month about how much it hurts, you can all remind me of how I boasted so brashly about being so tough.

Days until surgery: 21

I GOT AN ANGRY INCH

2007-05-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

How does one reach age twenty-nine and not know they have a one inch difference in their leg lengths? Well, I’ve always known I had *some* difference. I just never thought it was that big of a deal. Whenever I was standing, I would just shift my weight from one foot to the other. That’s what all the cool kids were doing anyway.

I started having back pain around the age of fourteen, which as it so happens is also around the time I had a big growth spurt. Looking back now, this is probably when my left leg decided to outgrow my right leg.

Also at the age of fourteen is when I started playing volleyball year round. I had three hour long practices everyday. I spent every weekend in southern California at tournaments. Everything on my body hurt, all the time. The back pain didn’t necessarily stand out. The same deal in college. Year round volleyball, body always hurting. Drinking a lot of beer seemed to help.

When I graduated college, I stopped doing any sort of strenuous physical activity. I got fat. Then after a few years I got tired of being fat and decided to start working out again. And also to stop eating chocolate chip pancakes for dinner every night.

The back pain immediately returned. It stood out much more sharply now that nothing else on my body hurt. I waited about a year and a half before I did anything about it, finally going to a physical therapist in the fall of 2006.

You have a leg length difference, he told me. Yeah, so? It’s probably causing your back pain, you know. Oh. Huh. Who knew?

My pelvis had dropped on my right side, tilting downward so that both my feet could be on the ground. Titled pelvis = back pain.

Over the next few months, my physical therapist worked to realign my pelvis using manual manipulation. I started to feel better. He also gave me a small lift to wear in my right shoe. No biggie, I thought. I’ll wear the small lift, and everything will be peachy from here on out.

But the back pain only ever got about 25% better. One day I was curious as to exactly how much of a difference I had. I pulled a few books of varying heights out of my bookcase, standing on them in front of a mirror until my hip bones were level with each other. Book after book, my right side was still lower. Finally, I found one that leveled me. And it was an inch thick.

Here’s me standing on the book:

And here’s me standing flat on the floor:

So why not just wear an inch thick lift, you ask? Well, you can’t, really, because your foot won’t stay in the shoe. Anything over a half of an inch needs to be built into the sole of a shoe.

So why not just wear one shoe bulked up one inch to correct it? That’s the question I get most from the naysayers. Why would you subject yourself to the long, painful, and possibly wrought with complications process of leg lengthening, just to correct one inch of difference between your legs? Stop being so vain and just wear the bulked up shoe!

If you’re nodding your head right now, thinking, yeah, why don’t you? Try this: put on one shoe, a thick soled one, like a sneaker. Leave the other shoe off. Now walk around for a bit. Now imagine walking like that your entire life. Don’t want to? Yeah, me neither.

So surgery it is! If you still don’t agree with my decision, take heart in knowing that I couldn’t care less what you think. Yay!

Days until surgery: 22

POST THE FIRST

2007-05-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Allison and the Angry Inch!*

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my leg lengthening surgery and all that follows. I figured this was a good way to keep family members and friends up to date on my condition. And, more importantly to me, it’s a way to keep my sanity as I spend most of the summer trapped in my 5th floor walk up apartment.

So for the next several months, I’ll report here on the ins and outs of my leg lengthening process. I’ll even include all the gory pictures. And I’ll probably also review whatever books I read or movies/television shows I watch in order to stave off the horrible horrible boredom.

My surgery is scheduled for May 30th. Until then, here’s a picture of a puppy:

Days until surgery: 23

* Special shout out to Sarah Niersbach for helping me come up with the name of this blog.