Avulsion for once

April 10^th to April 23^rd

So two weeks until the next visit and I manage to get a note that says I can work full time as long as I’m sensible. At least that’s what I ask them to have it say.

Its not a difficult time, I’m getting a little annoyed at not being able to ride and a little annoyed at not being able to drive and a little annoyed at how expensive taxis are and a little annoyed at having to continue to use crutches and a little annoyed with explaining what happened and a little annoyed with the winces and a little annoyed with the sympathy and a little annoyed by the people who so very studiously avoid looking at me when I get on the subway.

But I love how guilty they get when I do make eye contact with them, and I love getting that seat across from them where I can make eye contact at every opportunity and I love the fact that I’ve got two crutches that I can use to block the morons who think that people getting off the subway shouldn’t keep them from getting on the subway. There are many bruised toes over these two weeks!

And its fairly uneventful. Again my wife and I go out to a restaurant for lunch and again we’re sat as far away from the door as possible, but that’s become par for the course, an almost non-event.

I do come across one thing to warn people about - dress pants and aluminum crutches are less than good together. The pockets tend to gape when you’re swinging your crutches forward and of course if it isn’t the butterfly nuts getting caught in them its your thumbs. Nearly ripped my thumbs off a couple of times but that was nothing compared to getting the wing nuts caught and landing right on the ball of the bad foot. That was nearly as painful as the ultrasound.

I also manage to tumble on the subway platform. Every once in a while the subway platforms suffer from seepage. I was always careful around it and this time I was past it, or so I thought, but my right hand crutch shot out from under me and I started to go down, what was interesting is that I managed to take out some woman who was attempting to pass me on the right, despite the fact that I was close enough to a bench to bang my right forearm down on the seat. I don’t know what she was thinking but I hope she woke up long enough to survive the rest of her trip into work, though sometimes not.

I did get a day or two of telecommuting since I tried to avoid taking transit when it was raining, but it was a spring during which it only seemed to rain during work hours. Really annoying when you think about it. Nothing wrong with the day when it starts out, rain during the day making you dread the trip home and then the roads and sidewalks are dry when you leave despite all that worry.

I also get a lot of people telling me their stories. Heavy people with tales about their bad knees, slighter people with tales about compound fractures, older people with war stories and younger people with tales of woe about ingrown toenails. I’m a pretty approachable guy in most cases but I really don’t encourage people to tell me their life stories. I should have started carrying my pictures with me. “See, this is the incision just after my first cast came off…”, probably would have kept them quiet for a time.

The fifth appointment came around just in time to keep me from going insane with all of this, all of it and the promise of getting into an aircast at last. A chance to do a little weight bearing and the first proof that things were actually healing.

Again the visit to the clinic chews up the morning but my boss is pretty understanding about this, he’d gone through some pretty impressive surgery himself two years earlier so he understood. Again I get to joke around with Ricky Gervais who cuts off my cast and the surgeon takes a look at things, cups my foot by the ankle, presses his other hand against the ball of my foot and asks me to push down like I would an accelerator. So I scoot all 6 feet and 200 lbs of surgeon six feet across the floor. Okay it wasn’t quite like that but I surprised him enough that he let out an involuntary ‘whoah!’ when I pressed down with the ball of my foot and did manage to scoot him far enough he had to drag himself back.

He examined the points where the sutures exited my foot, checked the success of the healing on the incision and then compared the flexibility of my feet. I was back up to about 2/3rds of the range of motion I had originally and he said that was good enough for the boot. $150 later I was crutching down the hall all PWB and proud and the orderly told me that the next time he saw me he wanted to see me only using one crutch, and that on the left side.

Well, I had a surprise coming for him.

Pictures

This is how the incision looked as I went into the boot, nicely scabbed and flaky. Yum!

The took the cast off and I got a good look at the progress of the scar along my calf and ankle. I was a little disappointed, there was still quite a bit of redness and the scar tissue looked really shallow, but it was becoming obvious that the gathers that I worried about having to break up during physio were smoothing out all by themselves, certainly helped take a load off my mind!

My heel where you can see the two holes from the traction suture, all nice and clean.

There were just a couple of little scabs left on the bottom of my foot and the skin was already growing overtop, it looked really good underneath and I was no longer worried about the suture trying to crawl back out, by this time it had creeped up and out of the skin and into the meat of my foot.

Slipping into something comfortable and was it ever welcome.

The Aircast. It was most welcome and about 90% of the time it was comfortable, but because my toes peeked out over the end it was possible for me to situate the tongue in such a way that it put pressure right on my cuticles, which I can report is most not comfortable. It was thicker than my fiberglass casts so I was limited to wearing my dress pants or my wind/river cargo pants with the zip off legs. Thankfully April was a warm month.