Ankle Update

We had our second appointment with The Closer early this morning. He said he'd like to do the second surgery early next week. We've scheduled it at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA for Tuesday, March 2nd.

Both our nurse, Ashley, and Dr. Buchanan said the foot was healing up nicely. They also both said they thought of my ankle when they saw someone wipe out hard at the Winter Olympics. I have a CT scan scheduled for this Thursday in preparation for the surgery. He ordered a 3-dimensional reconstruction! Hopefully I'll get to post those up here.

I'm also now back on Lyrica to help with some of the neuropathic pain I've been having. If you've never had this kind of pain, it's annoying. Randomly, the tips of my toes, or my heel, or the soul of my foot will starting hurting. I don't even have feeling on the soul of my foot.

Now on to the pictures! Warning: it's still gross.

Here's a really good picture Brooke took of my external fixator. You can see how my ankle is still deformed from all of the tibia fragments. I've also developed quite a nice bruise up my entire leg. It still freaks me out to think that bar goes through my heel.

My incision site is, apparently, healing up well. It looks like a chainsaw wound to me. That ankle is still huge!

Here's what's left of the fracture blister. I learned in bad fractures, blisters can form on the skin and fill with clear fluid. In really bad fractures, those blisters fill with blood. I got the latter kind.

Here's a close up of the pin sites on my shin. Yep. Still disgusting.

The plan is to screw back together all of the large pieces of my tibia, secure it with another plate, and remove the millions of small fragments. The hope is the bone will heal back together and replace all of those missing pieces. This is a much better solution now than to have a total ankle replacement. It's always good to wait as long as possible for technology to improve before getting a prosthetic joint.

At some point, they'll throw on a cast after surgery. I imagine they'll wait a few days to monitor the swelling for compartment syndrome. I should return to a somewhat normal life next month!

I hope I get to keep the external fixator.