Miscellaneous

No update about surgery and the fixator right now; just some random stuff that happeneded today.

1. Me chilling out in my bed with my fixator and a mountain of pillows. This is the new normal. While I did spend a lot of time in bed between the surgery in August and the one last week, I was a lot more active, even venturing out to the zoo, Ikea, and the mall.

2. My brother decided it would be fun to play with my walker when he got home after work. He decided to hobble around in the hallway outside my room with it, to which I responded "Come back! You've stolen my legs!!!"

This is my walker. No, I don't feel like a little old lady like I did the last time I had to use a walker. This was in 2006 when I broke my right leg and left ankle and was transitioning from a wheelchair to crutches. Given everything that has happened, I have gotten over myself. Yes, I use a walker like a little old woman and am slow as one too... and cross stitch all day... and have set my ultimate goal as being able to carry a cup of tea. But I don't feel old. I feel like a young adult who has been but through an extraordinary amount given what started out as a simple broken leg who is now trying to put her body back together again, and that just so happens to require a walker.

3. Sinterklass Feest, kind of like the Dutch version of Christmas regarding gift giving and Santa is tomorrow. Being from the Netherlands, I like to keep up this tradition going. I knew that I would be unable to prepare anything for it after the ex fix surgery last week so wisely did last week Sunday. My cunning plan really involved me crutching around the dollar store trying to carry as much candy as possible (not much when your hands are busy supporting your whole body) while my mum waited in the parking lot in her car...). The next challenge was setting stuff up before tomorrow morning. My goal was to sneak into the living room in the middle of the night and fill a shoe for each person. This didn't happen. The ex fix surgery has demoted me from crutches to a walker (at least for the time being) so down the stairs to where we keep our shoes was not an options (narcotics and the walker makes stairs my nemesis). Instead I just yelled at my mum and brother to bring me a shoe, stat! close their eyes, and wait while I filled them with goodies. They loved it! Not as nice as having them find everything nicely set by the Christmas tree in the morning, but still fun.

You can see my fixator poking out at the bottom.

4.  I had my first home visit from physiotherapy this afternoon. I can't do much in the way of exercises because I am non-wait bearing, but the physiotherapist recommended some basic things to do to try to keep the inevitable muscle atrophy to a minimal. She will come back next week to see how things are going. Other than what she showed me today, there is not much more to do, so she will close my file in a few weeks and I will continue to do these exercises until the fixator comes off in March or April. At that point I will get physiotherapy visits again. It is at that time that the real work regarding physiotherapy - gaining back muscle strength - begins.

5. My mum and I were curious if my fixator was magnetic or not so we tried to stick a bunch of magnets on it. It's not. Later on I found some information about the ex-fix I am currently sporting online and read that "it is made of nonferromagnetic and nonconductive materials". So we really didn't have to test this ourselves because the information was ridiculously easily available on the internet. But still, it was a pretty odd and kind of funny scenario with us bent over my leg sticking magnets to different parts of the fixator to see what would happen.

6. After the whole magnet thing, we tried to figure out what the fixator is actually good for (you know, other than regrowing my tibia so I can walk again one day!). We figured the best use would be a game of ring toss since the pins stick out so far. Another option is some twisted version of pin the tail on the donkey... except it would be stick the bandage around the pinsites. Or take the staples out while blindfolded (mum suggested this one). For those more crafty among us, you could probably use the pins for some loose kitting project or something similar. We haven't come up with anything else so far, but I'm sure we will over the next four months.

7. There was a moment after dinner when I was sitting at the kitchen table about to use my trusty little wrench to turn the knob at the end of my fixator when the ridiculousness of the situation hit me. Ridiculous might not be the right word, but I don't know what else I would call it. It was more of a "Whoa, this is insane moment”. A thought that is interpreted as “you are sitting here using a tool to twist what is pretty much a very long nut and bolt together to force two pins sticking out of your skin to move a piece of bone inside your leg in order to tempt the bone one on the other side to grow towards it, thus filling in the gap". To any other person this would seem crazy and unheard of, but here I am in my own home, having just eaten and about to play a game of Yahtzee, attempting to regrow bone, and it is completely normal.

Edit: the word I was looking for is surreal. Using a wrench on a metal contraption attached to your leg in order to regrow your bone feels very surreal.