Off-Road Adventure for the Sentient Being
So, here I am, going slightly crazy from sitting on my ass and not being able to do anything fun. Unfortunately the pictures I have today are not as gruesome as the earlier ones, but it still keeps me from being bored, and that's more important to me than whether you my dear readers are bored. After all, you must be pretty dang bored already, or you wouldn't be reading this web page, right?
Just to rub in the fact that she can ride and I can't, Tresa went for a mellow dirtbike ride on Saturday. She started from Rabbit Creek and rode up to Silver City. I drove the truck up the dirt road and met her there to lounge in the sun for a bit and drink a weak beer. It's actually a pretty nice drive, but I can tell you I'm not in danger of getting all into 4-wheeling anytime soon. It's pretty much like sitting on the couch, except the picture quality is a little better. All I could think about was getting back onto my DR650 and how much less boring the same boring route would be when seated on a proper vehicle. The picture above is her showing off jumping off the loading ramp at Rabbit. If you look closely, you can almost hear her giggling "nyah nyah, i have 2 legs and you don't, nyah nyah." Some gratitude, eh? (lol, just kidding. She's actually been a total saint about this whole ordeal). We spent an hour or so riding off the smaller ramps a few months ago, so that she would be prepared for dropoffs like that on the trail, like the one in the sandwash at the Oreanna race, but this is the first time she rode of the top step. Woohoo, you go girl.
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Happily, all 37 staples came out a few days ago. My mom was curious what the staple-remover gizmo looked like, so I snapped a few pics of the physical therapist doing his work. I woulda thought she had seen one when she broke the living crap out of her hand in a bicycle crash 3 years ago and had pieces of steel holding her bones together that were actually sticking out through her skin, but apparently they just used stitches and butterflys there because the flesh on the hands is too thin for staples. Surprisingly, there was no real pain as they came out, just a mild itching. Happily, I can now sleep better, especially on the left side.
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Today is 3 weeks after the accident, so here are some boring pix, partly just so I can have something to compare with in a week or so to see if I can bend my knee any further, and see how the swelling above the knee is doing. I'm hoping to be able to ride a stationary bicycle (at low or no resistance) in the next week, but as you can see, I have a little ways to go yet to get that much flexibility in the knee. Right know the problem isn't the knee joint itself but the scar/healing/whatever tissue. There's alot of tightness just above the knee and to the right (where the little triangle of bone-exit-wounds is), presumably from those bone splinters wreaking havoc on the muscle there, so I'm doing some massage, application of heat, and patient but persistent stretching to try to break up the scarring and get the healing tissue to stretch and move. There's also a bit of tightness up near the top of the incision on the side of my leg. As I recall, the muscle actually was sliced in half lengthwise (and then stitched back together) to allow access to the upper end of the plate.
Hopefully the next pictures in a few days or a week will be of me riding a stationary bike. Go Mark!
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Here are the best shots from the preop xrays. Ick. In the right pic you can see a lovely sharp section at the end of the upper section of femur (pointing down). This is what poked out through the small hole by my kneecap. As you can see, the split in the lower section that is plainly visible in the post-op xrays is not at all clear in these.
In other news, I got a wheelchair today. That'll be much easier at work than crutches. I'm going to drop my mom off at the airport on Thursday (6/7/2007) and then work a half day thursday and friday. Just to be safe, I drove on the way to get the wheelchair. no real problems driving. It's comfier than passenging because my left knee is on the outside, so it's easier to get in and out.
Maybe next week I'll post some pix of my bike. It's really not very exciting tho, at least that I can see so far. Almost no damage.
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Here are the post-op x-rays (click for larger pics in a popup window). I should be able to get hold of the pre-op xrays later in the week for comparison. As you can see, there is a quantity of hardware in there now. If you look carefully in the left picture, you can easily see where the femur below the break was split completely in two all the way to the knee joint. You can also see there are a few good-sized fragments right where the main lateral break was. Apparently, the split was non-obvious on the pre-op pics, so Dr Gustavel made a small incision in front of my knee to insert a rod through the whole thing. Once he started poking around thre tho, it was clear that it was more involved, so it was off to home depot for a plate and some screws, which then necessitated the big incision on the side of my leg (see exterior pics, way below).
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The big risk at this point is to do something dumb or clumsy and pull screws out of the bone before it knits together. So I have to pretty careful to put no more than the weight of the leg on that side for 6 weeks. During that time I'll start on physical therapy to regain full motion in the knee, and hopefully around 4 weeks be able to pedal a stationary bike on very low resistance to help the joint and circulation and begin to build back some fitness and strength. I'll probably start doing upper-body weights again within a week or two, just so i don't die of boredom and inactivity. After 6 weeks I should be able to walk unassisted, but I'll still have to be careful for another 6 weeks or so. I assure you, the last thing in the world I want to do is muck up any of the hardware and have to go under the knife again, so while I'll be hitting the weights and fitness machines as hard as I'm allowed, I'll be very conservative regarding impacts and such.
Tentative prognosis is to return to fairly normal activity in 3 months. Thankfully, that will still leave me september in the high sawtooths, after the tourists go home. I expect my riding to fairly sedate through the fall, and I'll probably mostly concentrate on mountain biking and especially road biking to get back into shape. It'll be really nice to do some light walking/hiking and touristy things with the girl once I can get around better.
I was able to hobble around with my mom to run a couple errands today, and my stamina and general well-being is vastly improved over last friday, when a trip to the store left me exhausted. Current plan is to return to work thursday and friday for 4-6 hours each, and then play it by ear next week to see if I can work full-time, or if I should stick to 6 hours/day or so. Fortunately my job as a System Administrator for the government allows me to stay seated all day. That's one of the pluses of the tech biz that I tell kids when I speak at a career day at a high school, and for us active folks it's pretty nice to have injury not mean huge loss of work and pay.
Apparently it's a long process to even get a temporary handicapped parking permit in Idaho. At least I did get an official airport-alarm card with my name, description of the plate in my leg, and a small xray pic for when I get stopped in security.... lol.
Ok, not sure if I'm enough of a self-absorbed and conceited dork to think any normal person would actually read a 'blog', but maybe if you're here, you're not normal. I'll start with the good stuff, the pics!
So here's the full length view, from the side the impact came from. You can see three separate incisions. The actual break was about 2/3 of the way up the lower incision i guess. The scab just to the right of my kneecap is where one of the bone splinters poked out. Blech. The bruising I assume is just from the surgery, and is on my butt cuz that's been the lowest point of my body the last few days. I didn't land there or anything. When I get more news on Monday, I'll update the details, and maybe even get x-rays for the curious.
This is a closeup, which is of no actual use except to give you something else to look at.
In the front view, you can also see the cluster of three dots in the upper left where the other bone splinters poked out. Are you jealous? The incision below the kneecap was apparently necessary to make sure the two pieces of the lower bone were matched up carefully so as to be flat and even at the knee joint. I'm sure I will really appreciate this attention to detail. So far I have been very impressed with Dr Gustavel of Idaho Sports Medicine Inc. It was my lucky day to have him on call the night I came in.
tresa and i were on an atv-width trail, hemmed in by low dense trees, on a very gentle curve, so there was limited sight distance but not any terrain reason to slow down.i was probably doing 20-ish. we had just turned onto the trail and i caught a little air over a water bar, and was going to jump another one. my estimate of the other rider's speed is kinda guesswork, but it happened MUCH faster than any similar situation i have ever been in, with zero time for corrective action. by the time i realized he was there, i was lying on the ground, and not feeling too great. i couldn't feel anything near my knee, although my foot still worked, and i could clench my toes and move my ankle and stuff. it seemed pretty obvious that my upper leg and lower leg were not really connected any more, since moving one had no effect on the other. since all the numbness was in my knee, i was kinda thinking dislocation, but not really interested in taking a look at that particular time.
within a few seconds i heard more bikes coming (we hadn't seen anyone in hours) and tresa alertly ran down the trail waving her arms to make sure i didn't get run into again. after a few minutes of assessing the situation, and the other guy's injuries (not as serious), i sent tresa out to the road to find someone with an atv. some of you may realize what a cranky impatient little biatch i can be, and no one thought it was a great idea to just keep laying there and waiting for the sun to go down, so 2 fellows got some branches and splinted my leg with electrical tape to see if i could stand up on the other leg. that worked out ok, so we started thinking about one of them riding me out, but it was obvious that my foot was going to dangle on the ground, which didn't seem like fun. so i wisely had them lift me up so my right leg was on the peg, and just rested my left leg on the other peg to keep it from flopping, and had them start the bike and put it in gear and give me a little push, and i rode out the 2.5 miles to the road, standing on one foot, and hoping no one would come the other way, since my ability to take evasive action was pretty limited. at the intersection with the pavement, tresa and a guy with a truck were already there, and i managed to shout out to support me when i stopped so i wouldn't fall over. so they got me into this guy's truck (Rex) and he drove us back to our camp about 40 mins away, then dirtchic's family got me situated in the back of my truck and tresa drove me an hour to lagrande. at the hospital in lagrande they took xrays but by the time they cut my pants off it was pretty obvious that i had a busted femur. only a small part or two had actually poked out of the skin about 5" or so above the kne towards the inside. the ends of the bone were a ways away from each other.
so lagrande had no ortho available, so they flew me to boise. after getting hurt around 430, getting to lagrande around 730, i left there around 10-11 and got into boise about midnight. the ortho guy on call had a car accident victim to deal with first that was in danger of losing his leg, so i just hung out until 7 or so when they got me into surgery.
initially, the doc thought it would be pretty straightforward, the bone was broken clean through about 4" above the knee, so he was just going to zip in, insert a rod to hold it all together, and sew me back up. once he got in there tho, it turned out that the lower section of bone was split in 2 pieces all the way to the knee joint, so he ended up using a metal plate and a buncha screws to put it all back together.
looks like i'll be on crutches for 6 weeks. right now i can hop around a little, get up to pee, etc..... The keep giving me nasty painkillers that make me sick to my stomach and i keep asking for less and less. i went entirely without them the night after surgery cuz i was sick of being nauseous.
the worst part for me is not being able to comfort tresa. it was quite a shock to her to get the call on the way back from oregon that one of her close friends had been killed earlier in the weekend. now i feel pretty helpless. thankfully i should be going home today, so i can at least be a burden on her, lol.
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