Broken Foot - Still in Purgatory

March 20, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

I was looking forward to seeing the orthopedic doctor today, I wanted to get the whole diagnosis and the “cure” out of the way so I could start looking forward to being healed.

The ortho doctor came in and after some preliminary questions about how I broke my foot, he said the x-rays from the ER were inconclusive so they’d have to do some of their own, and we’d start by removing the splint.   The nurse started cutting the wrap off and I peered over to take a look.

I had expected my foot to look puffy, black and blue and generally all disfigured, but what I was NOT expecting were those huge hideous looking blisters encamped on my ankle.  I turned to the nurse with a horrifed expression on my face, and she nodded and said “fracture blisters”, those are quite common with your kind of injury.  I pulled out my iPhone to take a picture.  I’m not going to post it up here because it’s quite gross, so I’ll just post a link here and you can click at your own peril.

See Timmy’s foot, four days after the incident.

I told the doctor to take care of that thing growing off my ankle, and he’s like “well I can drain it if you’d like, or leave it alone and it’ll pop on its own.”  I had a vision of me lying in bed and feeling warm blood running down my leg one night.  I locked gazes with the doctor and said “drain it now”.

So the doctor nodded to the nurse who came back with a cart.  The doctor sat himself down opposite my foot and took a needle and stared intently on it.  He reached forward with the needle, and I swear here, I’ll swear on a stack of bibles, that he just like barely touched it before it split open and dumped a whole gallon of pink fluid on the table.  The nurse turned to me and giggled.  I made a nauseated face, but I was relieved that it wasn’t painful or anything.

The doctor said they’d do some x-rays on their own, so I was wheeled into the x-ray room where they took a couple snaps and then put me back in the other room to wait for the doctor to come back.   Doc comes back and puts up the x-rays and points to some white blob and says “thats your heel bone”, then pointed to some places here and there and said “those are fractures”.   I honestly wasn’t seeing anything.  He turns to me and says, “We can’t determine enough from this x-ray, so we’ll have to do a CAT scan.”

You just can see the dollar amounts of this whole medical epsiode spinning up crazily.  Thank god I have insurance!

So, I’m due for a CAT scan tomorrow, then meeting with the doctor again on Monday, and hopefully we’ll know whether surgery is needed.

Then they fitted me with this big plastic foot brace.  I believe Mr. Climbing Narc summarized it up the best - The Boot of Doom.

After the visit to the doctor, Gabe took me to the food store to stock up on a couple weeks worth of food since I’ll be pretty much on my own after he leaves tomorrow to head back to San Fran.

Upon arriving at the food store, I scored myself a sweet little ride, the grocery shopping cart/scooter!  And I could putter around the store like the little smug bastard I am, because I HAVE A BROKEN FOOT.

So there are some perks. 

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