New X-Ray Images

Even though I haven't been this tired in years, I'm like a little kid before Christmas with all these X-Rays and pictures to open up. I've already shown a picture of my foot to my friend, Andy, who just got a stupid hair cut.

He calls it a Euromullet. For those of you that have been following the blog, he and another friend of ours, Ken, named one of my scars The Friendship Scar.

Here's a synopsis of an adult and mature email conversation we just had about the new photo of The Friendship Scar we took earlier today:

Euromullet Andy: Tony, are you sure you're not a corpse?

Expert Snowboarder: If I was, according to the music video Thriller, I'd be an awesome dancer.

Euromullet And: Yep, not a corpse.

On to the X-Rays. We have the images Dr. Buchanan's office took before my second surgery, so those will be useful for comparison. A before and after of how I got beat up!

Here's the right face of my ankle before my second surgery. As you can see, there's my lovely external fixator screwed into my bones. The tibia is difficult to make out, but it's the definition of broken.

After surgery number two, here's a view of my ankle facing the left side. It's actually starting to look, well, normal. The tibia, once non-existent, is now back in place thanks to some fantastic work!

Like I mentioned earlier, The Closer and his team had to rotate most of the pieces about 180 degrees around to line them up properly. Apparently I was already developing arthritis. Severe injuries like this are the gifts that keep on giving!

Now, I understand with the picture above, it's essentially impossible to count the total number of screws The Closer used to hold each fragment in place. So let's move on to the next set of X-Rays.

Of course, as you can tell, this is after my first surgery. I've still got my comfortable external fixator installed snuggly into my bones. If you click on the picture and enlarge it, you can probably see the crushed tibia more.

Check that out! Night and day, huh? I have two plates, and one of them is in the shape of the letter L! And look, there's like an entire bucket's worth of bone screws and three hundred incision staples!

Well, I'm tired again. The last two posts will cover the post-op report and the gruesome pictures. I cannot wait to show you an updated version of the Friendship Scar!