Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Tuesday means that I wake up, eat, take antibiotics, sleep, eat, and then go to the Jackson Wound Center to see Dr. Carbonell.  I am telling you, when that man walks in the room, the clouds part, the sun starts shining, and everything starts making perfect sense. 

He loves the look of my wound and wants to do a skin graft on it soon.  He expects that my insurance company is going to fight it so he wants me to start working the phones tomorrow to get an approval moving along. 

He also thinks that he will be able to remove the external fixator in a month or two.  This will require an outpatient surgery for them to get the pins out.  I am telling you, at first I was not wild about my amazingly humongous piece of footwear but I have really worked it into my personal style.  I think I will miss stretching my underwear and pants beyond the limits of man-made fibers when it is gone.  Ha ha.

When he removes the fixator, he is also going to remove one of the plates that they screwed into my bones during the second surgery.  I didn’t really get it all at the time but now I understand.  You see, in order to reach the talus (the bone that I reeeeeaaaaalllllllyyy destroyed), he had to get around the fibula (look on the left side of the bone diagram).  So, he simply cut the fibula bone away, did his magical work on the talus, and then put the fibula back in place using a metal plate (see it on the x-ray?).  If my wound had just healed without getting infected, the plate would have stayed in there forever.  However, because it got so infected and they had to cut away all of the external skin, that plate has been exposed for the last month.  In the mean time, the fibula has actually healed and doesn’t need to be held together by the plate anymore so he is just going to remove it!  One less thing to set off the metal detectors.

Every day brings another baby step towards “normal.”  Today I felt strong enough to go and sit out on the driveway while the girls played with our dear neighbor boys, Kory and Nick.  My little nurses set up chairs for me, brought out plenty of food and Gatorade, and then carefully “walked” me to the driveway.  It was great. 

Annika so needs to be comforted sometimes with absolute knowns: No—I am not going back to the hospital.  Yes—I will walk again.  No—the wound is not going to get infected.  Yes—I will be able to go to your chili cook-off next Thursday.  However, she and I both know that I cannot promise any of these things.  So it was just nice to escape these sad unknowns and just feel “normal” for a bit. 

Love to all--Anne