Sorry this has taken so long, but here's the skinny on the latest round of surgery.
I got checked into Brackenridge at 8:30 AM on 11/17 as scheduled. J was with me and "C" showed up soon after and stayed with us the whole time.
I was supposed to be taken back for prep at 9:30 then surgery was to start at 10:30. Well, things got thrown back about 45 minutes or so, but beyond that everything went well.
The staff were as nice as could be and many remembered us from the original surgery back in January.
In prep they got my IV started, did more paperwork, and just kinda waited around. Then we headed into the OR. We chatted a bit while they were getting me set up. Then they said they were gonna put the mask on me and before that happened I was out. Next thing I remember I was in recovery, waking up and feeling pretty good. I was there for a while because there were 8 or 9 of us waiting for rooms. They finally got one for me and up we went.
In the room they hooked me up with diloted on demand for pain and started giving me tylenol #3 by mouth for pain. Well, I never touched the diloted and the only thing that happened while I was there was my foot did a good bit of bleeding at first. But that settled down pretty quickly and everything went great from there.
Next morning rolled around and I still had not touched the diloted so when Doc D came in, he told me I could go home. So we did.
At home I'd been taking 1/2 the dose of Tylenol #3 that I had been in the hospital and now I only take at night as a precaution. That's not to say my foot feels GREAT, but it is all more of the discomfort of the wrapping it is in more than anything else.
Apparently, besides jsut removing the hardware, Doc D also went in and cleaned out a lot of the scar tissue frm the first go-round and he also broke loose my big toe. It has been pretty limited in its movement and he tried to remedy that. The jury is out on the results of that since I can't hardly move my toes in all this bandaging.
So all that being said, here's a couple of pics. They've also been added to the slideshow.
This just shows how my foot is bandaged. No splint or cast this time. Just gauze, some kind of fluffy padding stuff, and an ace wrap.
We go in to see Doc D tomorrow to at least take a look at the healing progress. I don't know if the stitches come out or not or if I can start using it after tomorrow.
This is most of the hardware they took out of my right foot. They could not let me keep it all due to some kind of rules, but this is the big stuff. The pic shows its size, but this is some heavy stuff. The plate and the little screws all came in from the outside. The 2 big bolts came in from the point of the heel up into the fused ankle bones. The left is pretty similar as you can see in the x-rays in the slideshow, with the exception of no big screws coming in from the back.
This right foot should be healed up in another week so I can start using it and getting it strengthened back up. When it is strong enough, we'll start planning the extraction on the left foot. That'll probably be in January or February.
I don't know if this will resolve all the problems I'd started having, but I can already feel a difference in some ways so it should let me get back to doing more than I have been for the past couple of months. I sure hope so anyway! But all I can do is keep working at it and wait and see what happens.
I guess that's it for now!
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