A very brief explanation

It's going to be a short post today. I don't really want to get into details about whats going on with my leg and what we are going to do about it yet, but I don't want to leave everyone in the dark either.

In one of my previous posts, I listed three possible things that I thought might be going on with my leg: 1) external fixator is broken 2) new heterotopic ossification 3) premature consolidation of new bone. My bet was on number three but it actually ended up being numberw to... and three, sort of.

What has happened is that there was bone growth, quite a bit of it, at the docking site again. This time I got lucky because nothing splintered and started growing into the back of my leg. So no heterotopic ossification. Yay! This new bone, however, grew pretty damn quickly. It was less then three weeks between surgery and the x-rays on March 29th. During surgery, my surgeon completely cleaned out the gap at the bottom of my legs and made sure that the edges of bone were smooth. In that time, however, the whole thing filled up again. Not only that, but it hardened so much that I couldn't make adjustments to the fixator anymore - the new bone was in the way so the pins were bending. So that leaves us somewhere between options two and three. Not a heterotopic ossification but unwanted bone growth none-the-less; Not premature consolidation of the new wanted bone, but premature consolidation of the new unwanted bone at the wrong end.

Bummer. That being said, I was really expecting number three, so although it wasn't good news that we got it sounded good in comparison. Now we have some hard decisions to make about what to do next, and that's more a matter of weighing two difficult issues and seeing which comes out the winner and gets to be treated first as a reward than following guidelines or looking at case studies about this kind of thing... there literally are none.

And that's it, really. Not good but better than expected. I do have to make a decision on what to do by Monday, so that is a bit stressful. Who am I kidding, very stressful. I'm coping with it by not thinking about it. I'm sure I will regret that come Monday morning when I have to call my surgeon's office. But it is what it is. In a way it doesn't matter what I decide because there is no way of knowing what is best and I will have to live with the consequences, both good and bad, either way.

I hope everyone else is having a good weekend and want you to know that I am fine: I went to Ikea yesterday and bought a polka-dot tin and today I had smarties for breakfast. See? Totally fine. Night!