Of Mutts and Metal Legs.

It has been close to four years since my last post. Last time I posted anything on this blog, the word "covid" was either completely unknown or merely an unfortunate misspelling of the classification of members of the crow family. There has been much upheaval for me personally as well, which might explain the dearth of written work completed in these intervening years, but since I currently find history repeating itself somewhat, I felt inspired. 

I am currently laid up, and have been for the last month, with another broken ankle. I say "another" as if I have injured the other one this time, when in fact it is not just the same leg, but also the same bone as in 2010. Given that I was relatively new to blogging when I first broke my fibula and much more prolific in those days, I have been feeling somewhat of a sense of deja vu since this most recent injury and today the urge to commit my musings to a digital paper substitute too much to ignore any longer. 

On June 30th I took the incredibly wise decision to take my friend's dog for a run on the field close to our house, wearing only my office jacket, in light rain. I didn't think I would be out very long. Sammy is very low maintenance. You let him off the lead and lob a ball repeatedly until he gets tired, then you go home. I wasn't going to get that wet. However, no sooner had I let said dog off the lead and lobbed said ball, that I slipped and fell, on my very first step to follow his direction, down the hill that led onto the field, sliding on my backside until my already metalicised ankle met the ground at the bottom first and broke again on impact. I managed to call my husband who came immediately and between him and another neighbour, the dog was eventually taken home and an ambulance called, since, after Paul managed to get me up to the path, it was too treacherous trying to get to the car, which was parked as close as possible but still quite some distance away. After a full hour since the fall of sitting in the pouring rain, the ambulance arrived and managed to take me to hospital. (There was quite a bit of wrangling as Sammy didn't want to leave me so it wasn't as straightforward as today's prose indicates).  

I finally got a bed on the orthopaedic ward at 5.30AM the following morning, a good ten hours after the fall. The surgeon advised me that I was both lucky and unlucky: lucky, because the metal plate that was already in there from 2010's break had protected the part of the fibula it was bolted to. Apparently it would have been a much higher break were it not for my pre-existing Meccano set; however, I was substantially unlucky because this meant that the lowest point of the bone, where the plate did not extend to, was in rather a mess, and not only that, the break had impacted the nearby ligaments and tendons etc. The Plaster of Paris semi-cast I had been put in at about 2AM had not done anything to prevent the fibula and tibia from trying to separate above the foot and surgery was necessary the same day to not only replace my existing plate with a much longer one, but also to insert a special elongated bolt to keep the two bones together atop the foot, otherwise I would not walk again. The surgeon later told me, once the combined effects of morphine and general anaesthetic had worn off enough that I could fully appreciate the situation, that the surgery had gone well but the bone growth over the previous thirteen years meant that to get the old plate out he "had to do a lot of chiselling." I had been his first surgery after lunch. I do wonder if lamb chops had been on the menu.