Long over do update

I've made it to the half way mark. Six weeks down and six more to go! Six weeks and I... and I hope I will never have to go through any of this again.

On May 4th I went for my post op appointment. The surgeon was amazing, as usual (it makes such a difference to have doctors that have good people skills!). He went over everything that had been done during surgery and said he thought he had gotten all the dead bone out and crammed everything full off antibiotic beads and sponges. He was very pleased because he though a lot more would have to come out. He said that I could ditch my trusty arch nemesis (my crutches), which was a huge relief because the bag with my IV pump was always getting in the way. I'm not allowed to do anything but walk until the next time I see him, but I don't have the energy to be running around anyways. The staples were taken out (only seventeen this time), steri strips were put on with a dressing over top and I was good to go. I was given orders to see a colleague of the surgeon two weeks after the IV antibiotics have been finished (my surgeon will be on paternity leave).

This is one of the x-rays taken right after surgery when I was still in the PACU/recovery room before being moved to the orthopedic ward. The gray spots in are were bone had been taken away. Here you can see how deformed my right tibia is. It should be a lot smoother and thinner. 

May 10th I saw my infectious disease specialist. My mom and I had a really long talk with her about everything and all of out concerns and "what ifs". She was really good in answering all of our questions and reassuring us that even if things don't go as planned, we do have other options. She had a med student with her. A really nice (and attractive *wink*) doctor who was studying to be a specialist for pediatric cancer. He was getting some experience in other parts of the hospital because cancer patients can have so many different complications due to chemo, etc. On the one hand it's great that doctors can learn from what I am going through, but on the other you can't help wondering why they look at your case specifically. There aren't that many people with bone infections, and as far as I have been told a lot of the people my ID specialist sees are pretty straight forward cases (meaning no surgery/PICC lines). It was so weird to hear the ID saying she had had a very long conversation with the med students about me the day before. Hospitals are unique in that sense. You have a whole team of doctors who know everything there is to know about your health yet you know next to nothing about them. While there we decided to stop the Doxycycline because I had developed really bad heartburn (which can lead to ulcers) and some other not so pleasant side effects, and went back to the oh so familiar Septra (the name still reminds me of sepsis). The incision still hadn't healed so we put on new steri strips and decided to continue dressing changes. I see the ID again on June 14, when we will schedule my next set of scans.

Saturday the 19th the weekend nurse decided I didn't need a dressing anymore, even though parts of the incision still hadn't healed, so on Monday 21st I asked the nurse to put a new dressing on. By noon the steri strips had turned a yellow orangey tinge. The incision had decided to leak fluid. We kept putting new dressings on until two 1/2 days ago, and everything looked healed up.

Life has been going pretty slowly over the last few weeks. Some days I have a noticeably larger amount of energy, and other days, like today, it is hard just to get out of bed. The last few days the incision site has really been bugging me.  Late Monday evening it started to sting. I thought it might just go away so ignored it. Tuesday it didn't go away and when I looked at my leg I saw that the scar was pretty red and a pit puffy. Yesterday it really hurt and I could squeeze fluid out of the incision. Today it hurts a bit less and seems less swollen but I am nervous never the less. My mom keeps going on about "it looks a bit better", but that was the story with the infection for months and months before surgery. I am afraid that something is still going on. Surgery, antibiotics in my leg, and six weeks of IV antibiotics should not equal a draining incision. It feels like the skin is stretching, which happens when there is swelling. This isn't the swelling from surgery because that had started to go down, and never hurt. This time it definitely hurts and it is really red. I am going to call the ID tomorrow because I am not happy. On top of everything I feel like crap, am exhausted and have been battling a pretty bad headache over the last few days. I am exhausted.

Fingers crossed that everything is ok, but I am a pretty good judge about knowing if everything is doing as it should in my body.