The Tail of My Cut

Sorry about the delay, it’s been quite a week. When I left off, I had druggedly posted that the surgery had been a success, and I suppose it was (so says the Dr.). Now lets go back to the morning of March 29th.

I got to Kaiser Oaktown at 9:30 AM. The Matmos were trying to rush cross the bridge early to help, but they were a bit late so B and I just thru me into the RAV and headed out under our own power. The two of us were obsessed about not being late; missing my chance at the operation; I dunno. Obsessive compulsive. Anyway…

I led myself into Robert the Cast Dude’s lair and he removed the weird bulky cast I had on my right leg. The swelling seemed to have gone down somewhat, but man… the outside of the foot was totally flat, no little bump in the middle of the heel, no stereotypical foot shaped curve…. Oh, and it was a little purple-greenish. Ya, I do believe that’s going to have to come off. Dr. Ford and the resident came in and took a look and decided that yes, they could do the avant garde / experimental procedure.. no huge bloody metal plates for me.

From the CT SCAN, the Dr.s could see that I had shattered my right heel into 4 pieces, ‘like how an egg shatters’. Yikes… They are going to use screws and a small metal plate to keep it all together in hopes of it healing in the correct shape. Part of the reason it was so painful was because a piece of cartilage had slipped down in amongst the shattered bits of heel, so it was all scraping together. Ahem.

Success in this procedure would mean that I should have no trouble moving my foot up and down, however, it is not clear at this point how much side to side action I am going to get… so long professional basketball.

OK, so its across the campus to the Emergency OR, see, this was a ‘fit-in’ operation, and kind of an emergency as you have to operate on these kinds of things quickly, before they heal in the wrong position. After a few abortive attempts at finding the quick way up there, we found the ‘waiting hall’ totally full of folks in pain and on cell phones. They crammed Bevin, myself and my wheelchair into this murky triangular room; CourtTV blaring. I got into my hot hospital gown and began waiting.

By 11:30 I had started getting a bit of a headache. As per Dr.’s orders, I hadn’t eaten or drank anything since midnite the nite before.. actually since about 10. As a result, I had not had any coffee this morning and it was beginning to catch-up to me. I got my IV of fluids around one. By two I was in real pain and wasn’t having any fun at all. It wasn’t till about 5 that the anesthesiologist came to see me.

He told me he was going to give me a sciatic nerve block. This would numb my leg for like 3 days after the surgery – making pain management pretty easy, which sounded great. Telling me he would have to stick a needle in me just under the sitter and prod around my nerves to make sure he didn’t permanently damage me was a little creepy, but hey, I was feeling lucky.

I left for the OR at 6 o’clock. In the OR the anesthesiologist said, “let me give you a little sumthin’ sumthin’”… I have no memory of the sciatic nerve probe.

I awoke with the wife and brother-in-law next to me. A stricken looking woman across from me was refusing her pain meds and insisting that the nurse pray with her, with little success. My leg was hella numb and the Dr. came by to say the operation was a success.

I got home and blogged the last entry.

The next morning I felt pretty good the leg was numb and all systems go… Oh, I forgot to mention, I have to get injections into my tummy every morning. Yes, to keep from getting blood clots from sitting on my rump so long, I pinch an inch every morning, swab a little alcohol and ‘pokey-pokey’. It’s not so bad, but I don’t see myself going intravenous drug user any time soon.

All was peach until about 10:30, that’s when the numbing wore off and the pain began. Oh Lord, this was some delicious pain. More painful by far that the actual accident… or any other pain I have experienced. Piquant. I quickly downed a bit more than the prescribed pain meds… to little avail. I was left moaning and chanting mantras trying to get beyond the pain. I apologize to my bro-in-law who got to sit there thru it. It frankly was pretty funny. Martin came by and I suggested the two of them go for lunch, ‘cause I was downstairs and had to use the bathroom, which means the stairs – and I knew that wasn’t going to be pretty.

I had one more day of pretty excellent pain, then got on top of it. I then had a couple pretty good days, probably better than I was allowed. The pain meds were allowing me to do more than I should… Instead of just sitting and recovering, I was up and about, receiving guests etc. The other thing it was doing was playing havoc with my gastro-intestinal tract. On Monday, I decided to go off the meds… which led to two days of sleep. Sleep I should have been getting before but the meds were keeping me from.

This brings us mostly up to date. Yesterday I went with Ryan to get a second wheelchair for the downstairs (Kaiser sees this as luxury, tho if they’d ever BEEN to my place…). This went fairly well, ‘cept they didn’t give me a legrest… sigh….

Ok.. will update with some photos and info with more regularity from here on out