Last Monday

Well last week was quite the week!  On Monday, I had the time to write Tuesday and Friday's posts, figured to do the rest of them on Tuesday.  But, life intervened.

So, this has been my life for the past month, plus a few days.  About twenty pounds of titanium constructed as a brace around my poor right foot, with 15 pins and one screw shot through the bone of the foot, ankle, tibia and fibia.  Just not much fun at all and the reason for one huge hissy fit on my part in May.  Non weight bearing (no steps, no resting on ground even!, foot always in the air) and I was beyond very good!

And my body's inability to accept this kind of trauma led to two nights in ER and literally bringing me to my knees finally.  I had nothing left.  And I wrote previously of that experience: pleading for life in an ER where no one spoke German.  As I said, I had NOTHING left in me at this point except for the knowledge that God was not done with me yet.  And, I do mean nothing.

So, Monday night, I am getting ready for bed, take my night time pills, use my knee scooter to make it to the toilet and suddenly there is this huge "snap" - followed by incredible pain!  I have no idea as to what happened.  This contraption lives under four layers of gauze and ace bandages, so I had to gently unwrap it and there the problem was highly visible: the bone screw which attaches the frame to the leg had pulled out!

So I called Gaelic Girl and asked what I should do.  By ten o'clock at night, it was off to the emergency room at the foot hospital, again!  I called ahead, so they knew they had the foot rebuild coming back, yes, again!

But, I had to wait four hours for an empty room as the emergency room as overcome with whooping cough, chicken pox, cranky senior citizens and klutz cases.  It was quite a mixture.  Oh I forgot the one stoned dude that kept insisting that he needed to push my wheelchair down a flight of stairs.  Yeah, he was really out of it, but continually could be discouraged from actually doing it.  They brought in a security guard that would make a guerrilla look small to keep an eye on him.

A series of x-rays showed that the bone screw had not pulled out as I feared, but had sheered off in the fibia.  So, the broken screw was popping in and out of the tibia.  This then led to the collapse of the titanium structure and foot sliding out of alignment.  :(  Well there is $81,000 down the toilet!

Finally, the original surgical team was assembled.  Still no rooms available so they just set up a work area in a hallway and got to it.  You can tell a lot about a person at two in the morning, when they have been called in after a regular work shift.  Everyone was exhausted but they found this all very exciting.  In the few years since this surgery had been developed, no one had ever heard a metallic failure! 

By 5:30 AM Tuesday, they had pulled off the frame, disinfected the foot and leg, cast the same in a fiberglass contraption, and I donated the frame to Doctor's Without Borders, since there are people all over the world whom could use ankle correction.

And off to bed, blessed sleep awaiting me, and filled with enough pain killers to be sure Kris did not stir for very many minutes a day.

Sigh ... life ... the "why's" and "wherefores" one really must wonder at, at times.
Tomorrow, why did I label this "God's Will"?