Avulsion for once

Cheating the First Week

March 13^th to 19^th

So I’m counting my first week from Saturday to Thursday and that happens to be because all of my appointments for checkups and inspections were on Thursdays. Cheat #1

It was spring break, which didn’t mean much for me I was still missing work but it meant my wife (who of course happens to be a teacher) had the week off, sucks for her but it worked out well for me. Cheat #2

It was a dreary cold spring and every day I stayed inside, it rained, every day I went out it didn’t. Cheat #3

What probably counts more is that I suffered very little pain in my leg, though my chest, arms and abs were burning, crutches suck for the first two weeks. The Percocet remained relatively untouched and like the morphine and the Tylenol 3 before, didn’t do anything for my pain. They did provide some minor relief from swelling and their side effects thankfully counterbalanced the side affects from the antibiotics (which tasted a lot like cat urine smelled).

I was in a surgical splint with my foot in a full plantar flexion, the toes almost complete en-pointe. Still it wasn’t that uncomfortable and with my body geared up to repair itself and the insulation that I got from all of the cotton in the splint I didn’t need to worry about my foot getting cold when I did go outside.

My original plan had been to only take a couple of days off from work, but then I was informed of the presence of our short term disability plan and saved myself some vacation. While I was not-sleeping in the hospital I had come up with all kind of plans for what I would do with that time off. I could telecommute so I could work from home but I could also get a handle on ripping my LPs, perhaps get the bulk of them done. I spent about 100 hours playing stalker instead.

When we came home on the Saturday we opened up the pullout couch and sat down with take-out in front of the TV and watched movies, sleeping in the living room, nice and relaxing. The worst part of course was going to the bathroom, it really isn’t that easy to sit on the toilet when you’ve only got one good foot. I eventually got around to learning the trick about kneeling on a chair.

Sunday night I slept in my own bed. As I said before I’m a stomach sleeper so it became necessary to figure out something. I needed to keep the foot elevated at night because the pulsing of the wound kept me awake but I found that two pillows supported the leg nicely, when I woke up Monday morning the splint was actually loose enough I worried about it falling off. Not that that lasted for long but it gave me some hope that things were going well.

One thing about sleeping with two pillows under your foot, its really hard to do under the covers. I ended up sleeping in my dressing gown and wearing a sock. Kept me from getting too cold anyway and it wasn’t until my second cast that I was able to sleep comfortably under the covers with just a single pillow.

Monday was a lot of the same as usual, just a little more challenging. Get up, have breakfast, watch a little television (I got hooked on Boston Commons), have lunch and then mosey downstairs (sliding on my butt of course) to log in and do a little work and then slip into a game for a while. Have some supper, watch some TV, do some email and go to bed. It all started to get easy too as I repeated that Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thursday I had to get up early. This was the day when it became clear that Percocet actually does have an affect on me, it makes me cranky but by then I’d brought myself down to two a day. But I was a bit of a bear to be sure.

Still the cab came quickly enough that we had an extra half-hour worth of wait time at the fracture clinic. Still it was pretty quick and when we went in the cut off the splint letting me see for the first time what it was they had done.

And I’d forgotten my camera again.

There was still some seepage from the wound but it had scabbed over nicely. The wound itself was puckered together like a six year old had been trying to learn how to do gathers at the sewing machine ( yes I do personally know what that looks like - I gave up sewing early in life). Still it looked good and I gave my foot a couple of experimental twitches to see what it felt like. That set off an involuntary stretch which really didn’t feel all that good, and triggered a muscle memory based flick which hurt - well it hurt a lot.

Dr Whelan came in, examined the incision and the sutures, took a look at the penetrations for the button, threw some disinfectant on the wound and then told the attendants to put me in a hard cast.

Just before he left he said everything looked just fine.