I went back this afternoon for my follow-up visit to see if Dr. Olive thought I was ready for surgery. And, thank goodness, the swelling is minimal and I’m going to have surgery some time on Wednesday—but the clinic’s offices were already closed by the time the doctor saw me (my appointment was at 4:40), so they’re going to call me tomorrow (Tuesday) morning to let me know what time surgery will be on Wednesday.

He is going to have to go in and plate both ankle bones—a spoon-shaped plate on the fibula (outside bone) and a claw-plate on the tibia (inside bone) to grab the little tip that broke off and reconnect it to the rest of the bone. He said that I’ll be in another cast-splint for a week after surgery (but that he’ll do a “much better” job with it than they did in the ER, with plenty of padding) and then after that, I’ll be in the boot and able to start putting weight on it.

Pray they can get me in early on Wednesday for surgery—it’s outpatient surgery, but the later in the day they do it, the more likely they are to have to keep me in the unit overnight for observation. And since I had a bad reaction to the anesthesia after my back surgery seven years ago (sick to my stomach), I’m afraid that if it’s later in the day and I get the least little bit nauseated, they’re going to want to keep me overnight, which will just serve to run up the expense.

Once I know for sure what time surgery is, I’ll post it here and on Facebook.

The doctor’s appointment went well this morning . . . we didn’t have to wait long, everyone was very friendly, and, best of all, they took off the cast/splint after taking a couple of X-rays to make sure nothing had shifted or displaced since they set it at the ER.

I knew my leg was swelling and bruising around the splint, but I had no idea how much.

Warning—these photos are not for the faint of heart!

You can see in this first picture exactly where the pieces of the cast/splint was pressing against my skin. The bruise down around the ankle doesn’t look nearly as bad in the photos as it does in person. The doctor says it’s a fracture bruise, but the shape of it is defined by where the pieces of the splint were pressing against it. As soon as the nurse pulled the splint off, I took one look at it and say, “It’s no wonder the skin there has felt like it’s on fire!”

I did break both the tibia and the fibula. The little piece at the bottom of the tibia (the inside of the ankle) broke off, so that will have to be pinned/plated. The fibula (outside of the ankle) has an oblique fracture—it looks kind of like a checkmark and goes diagonally up through the bone just above the base. There’s also still a space between the tibia and the top of the foot (the talus), which they also need to correct in surgery.

He was concerned about the amount of swelling I still have, and won’t make a decision about when to do surgery until the swelling goes down—hopefully when I go back for my follow-up appointment on Monday. He wrapped it up with an ACE bandage and probably would have sent me home with just that, but we’d taken my mom’s “boot” that she wore post-surgery five years ago, which is soft inside, with an air bladder that can be pumped up for compression/stability, and a hard brace/foot for protection, which he put on and pumped up properly for us. He sent us to get compression socks—but we had a hard time finding what we need without first measuring my leg—and we still need to get the handicap tag for the car.

Looking at it, he said he’d really hoped to be able to do surgery tomorrow. So no such luck on getting out of surgery. 😦 But the good news is NO MORE CAST! And right now, every small victory counts.

And, just in case you aren’t grossed out enough already:

In a reply to someone’s comment on Friday’s post, I wrote:

I figured I’d lose it as soon as I got home or as soon as I talked to my mom, but I still haven’t—not a single tear. I don’t know if it’s some kind of delayed shock and I’ll loose it as soon as I see my parents (Dad’s coming tomorrow), but I’m actually more concerned about my lack of emotional response to this than what I’m going to have to go through in the next week or so.

Well, the dam broke Sunday night after I got to my parents’ house. I spent about an hour in tears, with my mom just sitting with me listening as I cried about how I could have lain there on the ground for hours without anyone missing me or realizing anything had happened to me. About how I don’t want to be this person who’s so alone in her life as a single that she has to depend on her sixtysomething parents to come bring her home with them to be taken care of. About how I don’t want to be this person under the constant stress of deadlines, whose career depends on the continual and constant approval of others. About how I don’t understand why my life seems to be getting worse year after year instead of better (even though I know it’ll never be easier, isn’t it supposed to get better as the years go by instead of worse?). About how much I hate not knowing from month to month if I’m going to be able to pay rent and utilities, much less have the luxury of being able to go to the grocery store or put gas in the car. About how this injury coming on top of one of the most difficult eleven months I’ve ever had in my life just doesn’t seem to be fitting in with the grand scheme of things. About how I don’t want to be gone from my normal life for two months. About how I’m tired of having to ask for help. About how much I hate not being able to do things for myself. About how frustrated I am at not being able to get around on my own. About how tired I am of being sore and in pain (more from the overworked muscles compensating for the injury than the actual injury itself).

Then again, I said, it could be worse. I could still work at the newspaper (a job I hated, where I worked when I had a ruptured disc in my lower back and lived in constant excruciating pain—yet still had to go in to the office every day and be the person responsible for the positive morale of the office full of people who didn’t want to be there any more than I did).

I could still be struggling to try to get published while working full time and not understanding why I couldn’t seem to get ahead.

It could be much worse—I could be someone who’s totally and completely alone and doesn’t have anyone, much less loving parents, who are willing to drop everything to come help me out in a crisis like this.

And it could be even worse than that—I could have had this happen on top of all of the other stress and struggles and strife I’ve had this year and not have the hope that somehow God will redeem this situation and bring me out a better and stronger (though even poorer?) person next year.

And then a quotation that I found when I was compiling the Little Whispers of Comfort for Busy Women book last year came to mind:

“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.” ~Mother Teresa

I’ll be calling the orthopedic surgeon’s office first thing Monday morning to find out if they’ve received the files from the ER in Nashville and when they can get me in to have an MRI and get surgery scheduled (though I am praying really hard that a miracle will happen and they’ll say I don’t need surgery). Most of all, I’m looking forward to getting in to see them and getting this temporary cast/splint off. There are several places where it’s rubbing on my calf/ankle that could quite possibly drive me insane if I have to face living with it on much longer!

I’ll update here and on Twitter and Facebook as much as possible as I learn anything more (though I do have an editing project I need to bury myself in tomorrow, so I need to limit my time online).

Update, Monday 10:15 a.m.
I just got a call from the orthopedist’s office. They received the records from the Nashville ER on Friday, she gave them to the doctor, who is reviewing them. As soon as she hears back from the doctor as to how soon he needs to see me, she’ll call back and set up the appointment.

Update, Monday 2:45 p.m.
The gal from the doctor’s office called back a little while ago. The doctor reviewed the file/X-rays from the ER and I’m scheduled to go in at 11:20 on Thursday for my initial appointment. I’ve had quite a bit of pain this afternoon—both in the joint between the ankle and the foot (right where it was dislocated) and the nerve-endings at the surface all seem to be having a grand old time misfiring and making the skin feel like it’s on fire. So I’m not getting much done, as that makes it hard to concentrate, so I’m trying to rest as much as possible (with construction noise going on around me—my parents are having a new sunroom built onto the back of the house). So, until Thursday, I won’t know anything more about surgery.

And that was my favorite pair of jeans, too!

Short version of the story:
I fell and dislocated and fractured my right ankle, and I have to call an orthopedist’s office Friday morning to talk to them about scheduling surgery. I’m going to ask for a referral to see a doctor in Hot Springs, AR, so that I can stay with my parents at their home instead of one of them having to come stay here for the surgery and then take me back with them afterward.

Long version of the story:
I went out to Trevecca (the university where I finished my Bachelor’s degree six years ago) to work in the library—somewhere I can’t connect to the internet—this afternoon. Around 6ish, after finishing a chapter and writing summaries for the next couple of chapters, enough to be going on with tonight, I decided to head home. As I neared the bottom of the hill from the library to the parking lot, the sidewalk ends, and I stepped into the grass to keep from stepping out into the street because I heard a car coming from behind me. My left foot landed on an uneven piece of ground, and when I tried to compensate with my right foot, it hit an even more uneven piece of ground and I went down—foot going one way, ankle going another. It was pretty gnarly. (The ER nurse told me I lacked only broken skin for it to be a massive compound fracture.)

And of course tonight was the night I left the house without my cell phone in my hand! (I’m usually so anal about making sure I have it with me.)

An angel of a student came over and called 911 for me and stayed with me until the fire truck arrived (Trevecca has an assisted-living facility, so they respond pretty quickly to emergency calls out there). They kept saying how amazed they were at how upbeat and chipper I was for someone with an ankle that looked like mine. (Of course, none of them happened to notice I was trembling like I was sitting on the San Andreas fault line during a 9.0 earthquake and offered me a blanket, but they sure did notice I was chipper!)

The ambulance arrived and they splinted my ankle as best they could and took me to Baptist Hospital (which is great—because that’s the hospital where I had my back surgery several years ago and my GP doctor is affiliated with Baptist, so they already had all my info on file). I had a very cute male nurse (Zach) who’s from Louisiana and, even though he didn’t attend there, is a huge LSU football fan, so we chatted about that off and on. I told them I can’t take any narcotic pain killers (morphine, oxy, anything that ends with -cet, codeine, Demerol, etc.) because they make me very, very sick, so they didn’t give me anything. My pain level was about an 8/10, but localized in the ankle (nothing compares to the pain I was in from the ruptured disk before back surgery in 2003), so I survived with nothing. They brought the portable X-ray in and got several images from different angles, then, after the doctor looked at those, they knocked me out for a couple of minutes so they could reduce the ankle (do the Old West yank and tug and get it to pop back in place). I didn’t feel a thing until they were already in the process of splinting it.

By this time, it’s after 10 p.m. And I had no cell phone—but fortunately I did have my laptop with me, and my family phone/address list is on it. So I was able to call my cousin and his wife, who live in East Nashville, and get the family grapevine started (they charge $3.75/minute for long distance calls at Baptist!). Every time my mom tried to call, a nurse or doctor walked into the room with some info or something for me to sign. I was finally released a little before 11 p.m. My cousin, Randy, came and picked me up, and when we got back to my house, I immediately ensconced myself in my office chair, because it rolls and I have hard surface floors (mostly wood) throughout my house, so rolling is much easier than trying to use crutches.

I finally got to talk to my parents after I got home. I’m going to call the orthopedist’s office tomorrow morning and see if they can refer me to someone in Hot Springs, then try to talk to someone out there and see if I can have my surgery there instead of here. My dad is going to drive over on Saturday, either to take me back on Sunday or to stay with me through the surgery and then take me back to Arkansas. Either way, I’ll probably be in Hot Springs through New Year’s.

At this point, I don’t need anything. My cousin and his wife are going to go get my car for me tomorrow (it’s still at Trevecca, obviously, since this is my right foot and I wasn’t supposed to drive tonight anyway, due to going under anesthesia briefly tonight).

There’s never a good time for something like this to happen, but I don’t know that there could be a worse time for this to happen—what with The Art of Romance three weeks overdue and an editing project, which I haven’t started yet, due back to Guideposts on Monday.

So, that’s the long version of the story. It’s now midnight, and I still haven’t taken any pain killers. The ankle is painful, but only about a 3/10 (again, I do have a much higher pain point of reference than most people). I haven’t eaten since lunch, so I’m going to fix a bowl of soup, take some Excedrin PM, and go to bed…because my day will start pretty early on Friday with calling doctor’s offices, etc.

Prayers are greatly appreciated!

Update, 11:15 a.m. Friday
I had a relatively good night last night. I did have to get up once and take some more aspirin (after two PM painkillers before going to bed), but I was able to find a position that was comfortable enough to sleep for a solid six or seven hours. The right ankle is aching when still and pretty painful when being moved around. My left ankle was also twisted in the fall and mildly sprained, so that has made getting around just that much harder. My upper body (arms and shoulders especially) is sore from having to push myself up/take my weight for balance whenever I move. I’m hoping that this won’t make my back pain flare up. If it does, then I might consider getting the prescription that they gave me at the ER last night filled.

We’re in the process of trying to find an orthopedic specialist in Hot Springs who can get me in on Monday (and get the files transferred over from the hospital here, etc.). My dad is driving over on Saturday to help me pack up and then we’ll head to Hot Springs on Sunday, most likely. I’m ready for a little bit of parent pampering.

So, a freelance check came in the mail yesterday. Yay! (And shortly after that, I got a great e-mail from my agent about . . . well, I’ll keep that under my hat for now.)

Immediately upon depositing the check into the bank, I went to the Tabernacle of St. Grocery to take my monetary tribute and be blessed with good things to eat in return.

When I left for the store, my fridge and freezer looked like this:

(Eww . . . gross—yes, the fridge needed to be wiped out.)

And after leaving my offering at the electronic altar, they looked like this:

(And what isn’t pictured are the whole-grain pastas and canned/dry goods and bag of apples and two pomegranates that don’t go in the fridge.)

It’s amazing what being able to go to the grocery store, even on a limited budget, can do to boost the psyche. (Especially when followed by really good e-mails from my agent.)

What’s in your fridge?