My leg

So this is my leg now.

I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet. I've been calling it functional. It is a functional leg. Not fully functional, but I can hobble around the house and carry a cup of tea to my room, so for the time being I am content.

That's not entirely true. I wish I could walk and run and skip and jump. I wish I could leave the house in the morning and let my feet carry me wherever they might go. I wish that every step wasn't painful. I wish that every step didn't require my full concentration. I wish that my balance was better. I wish I could bound down the stairs in the morning to get the post out of the mail box. There's lots of things I wish I could do and not being able to do them is beyond frustrating. In my head I can walk perfectly; I see myself moving about with a spring in my step. But it doesn't translate into reality. My leg doesn't respond to what my mind is telling it to do.

But I can carry a cup of tea. That's something I've been harping on about for months: if I can carry a cup of tea, everything will be alright. It doesn't fix things, but it makes them better.

Just for comparison, here are a couple of pictures of my leg when I relapsed, while I was waiting for surgery, and between all the surgeries I had in the last nine months.

Relapse.

 

Last summer, some time in June when I was starting to feel a lot worse.

Post-op appointment in September. My tibia was held together with bone cement.

Last November, right before surgery number five.

Right after surgery number five.

 A couple months later; all the incisions are healed up nicely.

Sometime in March, after surgery number six.

Just under two months ago, in April, after one of my fixator pins was removed. Conscious sedation is so nice compared to general anesthesia.

And that brings us back to now. For anyone who is curious, the really long scar is 26 centimeters long.

The last picture amuses me a bit. Different sections of the scar are different colours. This has to do with when the incisions were made. The part of the incision near my knee, for instance, was made in November whereas the middle section of the scar is was made in March. On top of that, the section closer to my knee had never been operated on before. That section of scar has healed as a nice, thing white line. The middle section, however, has been operated on six times. It is thick and ropey. Meanwhile, I also have the scars from the fixator pins the tracked through my skin. They are just ugly, super thick and a dark shade of pink/purple. I think the new version of my leg is going to take some time to get used to. I am really glad that I took pictures over the course of all these months. It's fascinating to see how my leg has changed.