I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

Dr. Google is nobody’s friend. Just saying. Too much time on your hands, with limited mobility and little more than a remote control and a laptop within easy reach is a recipe for disaster. I’ve been reading up on medial malleolus fractures, and while it may not amount to much, they tend to be more complicated than the distal fibula fracture I enjoyed last spring. I am resolving to not dip again into the Ocean of Medical Opinion that keeps beckoning me until I get to see the orthopedist. Of course I also resolved to lose twenty pounds this year, and we all see where I got with that.

Right now the hold-up is getting a worker’s comp case number assigned. The specialist I have been referred to won’t see me until the file is officially opened. I’m guessing they’ve been burned before by worker’s comp claims that turn out not to be. Still … today is Tuesday, I got hurt last Thursday, and there’s still no word that anything has moved forward. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to bug anybody till Wednesday, but I didn’t promise myself what time Wednesday. I’m hoping the front-line supervisor is awake at 6:00am. Cause I am. And other than brushing my teeth and feeding the cats I don’t have a helluvalot on my daily calendar at the moment.

Learning from the last time around, The Professor wasn’t going to let me slide upstairs on my butt to get to bed every night and then slide down the stairs on my butt every morning. He took the box spring and mattress off the twin bed in the spare bedroom and set them up downstairs in the dining room, an easy twelve feet or so from the powder room. On the downside, my world has become that much smaller, but it’s only temporary. I’m working on my skill with crutches, but so far it remains “walking with chopsticks” territory. And I can’t use chopsticks for squat.

At first I declined the offer of painkillers that the hospital tried to push on me. After all, I did fine without painkillers the last time I broke my ankle, and I hate the way they make me feel. But after three and a half hours in the emergency with the pain failing to abate, I was open to perhaps changing my mind. I didn’t use the Percocet they gave me until I went to bed. I took one at 10:00pm and another six hours later. I then spent the entire next day nauseous. Cured of Percocet, I’ve been happy to be painful since then. My appetite is still off, but that’s just as well since making any kind of meal and then transporting it to a place I can eat it is an effort I’m not entirely willing to make at the moment.

Maybe I’ll lose those twenty pounds this year after all.

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2 Comments

  1. I’m so sorry you broke your medial malleolus. (I had to google it to see what it is, although I was right when I guessed it was a bone in the foot or ankle.) I have a suggestion for you since all you have right now is time and your laptop: find someplace you can rent a walker or a knee scooter. I think the knee scooters are actually called something else, but they are a little wheeled scooter you ride on your bad side’s knee and push with your good foot. An old friend of mine used one when she had surgery on her foot a couple of years ago. Seriously though, fumbling around with crutches when we are over 50 is just begging for a secondary injury. If I lived within a few hundred miles of you I would loan you my grandmother’s walker which I have used every time I injured some part of my walking apparatus since she died. While it’s true that walkers are slow in comparison to the very long gait a good crutch user can accomplish, you and I are NOT good crutch operators.

    I really hope you heal quickly. I know how boring it is to be cooped up in the house feeling rather useless because I’ve been living that for most of the last 15 years.

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