Ankle-Fusion...A different kind of adventure.

I am now six months post-op since my surgery in December and I wanted to write about my journey.

Last year, exactly a year after my initial accident (and still having no knowledge of what was truly wrong with my shit), I said I wasn't going to bitch about my ankle any longer...a year of bitching about it was enough and it was time to move on.  I really wish that were the case, but truth be told, my thoughts are completely obsessed with the healing and taking extra care, worrying about the pain, just everything that comes with having an ankle difference.  I try to stay as positive as I can, but it's difficult when I want to be so active and I really can't be right now.  I've found a few ankle fusion support groups that have helped me understand that I'm not alone in this.  It's reassuring to hear other people's stories, what they've gone through, where they are, where they're going and tips on feeling better.

So, here's my story.

When I moved to Chiang Mai in February 2012, the first time that I needed to cross the street, I knew at some point that I was going to get hit by a car.  Call it a premonition, call it coincidence, call it whatever, but I could feel it.  I never actively thought about it, but I knew it would happen.  When I moved into my first apartment, I lived a five minute walk to my school.  That's when I started having dreams or visions of my left leg in a cast and me hobbling to work on crutches.  I could literally envision myself walking down the street that led to my school on crutches.  Two months after I started teaching, that's when it happened.  BAM!  Three underage girls on a motorbike slammed right into me.  Frogger: Game Over.

When I got to the emergency room, I was taken to the X-ray room and only had one angle of an X-ray taken.  THE angle that didn't show the fracture in my ankle.  I was diagnosed with a torn ligament, sent home with a cast on my leg and crutches under my arms.  The premonition came true.

July 8, 2012.  Frogger D-Day (left)
Two weeks later (center, right)

Many of my friends told me then, that I would have been better off with a broken ankle.  "Broken ankles heal so much easier than torn ligaments."  "Torn ligaments are so painful and take forever to heal."  These where the things I heard from so many people, which I think ultimately made my problem worse.

By October 2012, I was exploring Angkor Wat on a
misdiagnosed broken ankle.

Take no prisoneeeeeers!  Lara Croft, eat your heart out.
Exploring the magnificent temple of Ta Phrom.

The pain I was feeling for so long, I thought was normal because of what everyone told me about torn ligaments.  Therefore, I put up with it, thinking it would get better in time and wear off.  Thaaaaaat never happened...

A month before I left Thailand, nine months after my accident, I decided to see an orthopedic surgeon because I started to think my ligaments didn't heal properly.  He sent me for another X-ray - of the same, wrong, angle they took in the ER.  Because it was the same angle, again he didn't see the fracture.  He suggested I get an MRI to check out the joints and cartilage.  I decided to wait until I moved to Korea.

By the time I came to Korea in May 2013, I was broke like a joke.  The pay in Thailand is shit if you're trying to save, so I thought I would try acupuncture to help with the pain until I could get in to an orthopedic doctor here.  I really believe the acupuncture made the pain worse.  They did this blood-letting thing that never really helped, and after a few weeks, that's when my pain worsened.  By September, I finally got in to see an orthopedic doctor who only works on ankles and feet and had an MRI.

Some crazy, medieval blood-letting acupuncture...

The news wasn't good.  They took X-rays of all the angles of my ankle, which finally showed the doctor that my ankle was fractured.  The MRI showed the extent of the damage to my joints - they were trashed.  The MRI also showed the necrosis of the bone.  Because I was misdiagnosed, I was walking on a broken ankle for over a year.  That led to my ankle bone collapsing, which cut off the blood supply to the bone, which meant my ankle bone was dead.  I saw two doctors who both told me the same thing: I had one option because the extent of the damage was so severe and chronic arthritis was settling in.  I had to remove my ankle bone and ankle joints, replace the bone with either my hip (hell no!) or cadaver bone, then screw it all together, let it marinate, or fuse - if you will, then I would be pain-free.

I decided to have surgery from the doctor who offered to replace my ankle bone with cadaver bone.  I've seen the extent of extra pain years down the road from using part of your hip to replace bones (my mom had this done for her knee), and I wasn't about to put myself through that.

I had my surgery here in Korea on December 20, 2013 (here's my account of what it's like to stay in a Korean hospital).  I can't say it hasn't been challenging.  Going through major surgery, alone, and in a foreign country is not the easiest thing I've ever done.  The doctors are great here, very thorough and attentive.  They speak English.  And medical care is insanely cheap.  I probably paid at least 10 times less the amount it would have cost me back home...and that's a low-ball guesstimate.  The only bad thing is that Koreans don't use very strong drugs to kill pain.  My first night after surgery was fucking awful.  I think if there would have been a sharp object within reach, I would have cut my leg off.  That might be an exaggeration...but it wasn't pleasant.

Night before surgery:
The one on the left is the right one.

The day after surgery.  Ouch. Ouch. Ouch!

Getting a look at my battle wounds for the first time
while getting the dressings changed in the hospital

Needing to get my dressings changed before getting a hard cast after I made it home from the hospital.
Close to infection :-/

Here I am now, six months post-op and it's slowly getting better.  I don't need crutches when I'm at home walking around, but still do to walk around my little city.  If I do too much, it gets pretty painful (and "too much" isn't very much at all).  This last month, I've been able to do a bit more, which is giving me hope.  Sometimes I get up and have no pain at all, so I'm waiting for that day to come when every day is pain-free.  Through the support groups, I'm finding that this sort of surgery takes a good 18 months to fully heal.  My doctor said about a year.  So I'm definitely on my way ("from misery to happiness again...uh huh uh huh uh huh")!

Ready to journey outside for a bit

For any of you out there that are going through this...I feel your pain - literally.  For any of you thinking about having this kind of surgery, it's a long ass recovery, I'm not gonna lie, but it's slowly becoming a good decision that I made.

My ma came to Korea to help out for a few weeks...
Giving me a Bronco pedicure :)

Bronco blue cast. Bronco orange toes. One Bronco sock.
Lucky 2013 playoff combo!

Sweaty feet?  Just use the "cool" setting aaaaand RESULT!

Just a side note: Obviously my Bronco Blue cast was lucky...it got us through the playoffs.  My doctor took my cast off after we won the Championship game against New England.  Then we lost the bloody Super Bowl.  I would like to formally apologize to my fellow Bronco Country fans.  I should have convinced the doc to keep my cast on until February 3rd.

Battle wounds a few weeks after my hard cast came off

My big sis had some Bronco Nike's made for me for Christmas.
It wasn't until May that I could finally wear
the "Bronco" side...and proudly show off the battle wound!

Five screws and the bone of a Korean dude...
I can now say that I'm part Korean.

Battle wounds as of June 2014.
Coconut oil does WONDERS for scars!
(I only really used it for the first two months after my cast came off)

UPDATE: July 13, 2014 (I meant to post the update a few weeks ago...better late than never!)
As of June 23, 2014 I am crutch freeeeee!  For the first few weeks, I had about the same amount of pain without crutches as I did with one crutch, but it's slowly easing...and also dependent on the weather.  I'm considering a new career as a weather-chick...my leg tells me when there's a storm a' brewin'!

On the left is my X-ray from a few weeks after my surgery when my leg was in a cast.
Inside the red box, you can see a defined white square, which is the Korean bone.
X-ray from June 23rd, the white square is less defined because my bones are fusing with it.
Amazing!

Happy Trails, fellow ankle-fusioners!

One day (hopefully) soon...I WILL walk 500 miles ;)

What did you say? Cross-cultural mix-ups!

Over the last eight years, I have lived in four different countries across three continents.  Each country having it's own unique culture and slang in speech.  I have a tendency to mimic habits and patterns very easily (but learning a new language is quite difficult for me).  I've recently realized how often I cross-reference slang and speech patterns.

For instance, in the United Kingdom, most people greet each other by asking "You alright?".  It's the equivalent of saying "How are you?" in the US.  The first time someone asked me if I was alright, I was going through the checkout at ASDA (that's the UK equivalent of Walmart).  When the checkout chick asked me if I was alright, I said "Yes", with a quizzical look on my face, "do I look sick?".  I started thinking maybe my face had gone pale or something.  It took me about a month or so to get used to being asked if I was alright, and quite a while longer before I started greeting the Britons the same way.  I really started to use it when I began working at Starbucks...then it became a full-blown habit.  In the beginning, I never really knew how to respond to that greeting because I always felt like everyone thought I was sick.  I remember one of my flatmates from university asked me how he should respond to being asked "What's up?" because they don't use that greeting in the UK, and that's how I had previously greeted people.

Although I haven't lived in the UK for about four years now, I still greet people that way because it became a habit and I haven't lived in the US long enough since then to adjust back, I suppose.  I never realized that I still use it until yesterday when I greeted one of my Korean friends that way.  My other Korean friend that I was with thought it was funny that I asked her that when I first saw her.  It got me thinking about other cultural references and habits that I've picked up along the way.

Living in Thailand, I picked up the "grunt".  I found that when Thai's are on the phone or having a conversation, if they agree with something, they make this deep-throated grunt noise.  I realized last weekend that I frequently make the grunt noise...I had to grab a taxi because of a mix-up, idiot mistake, on the subway.  The cabbie didn't speak a lick of English, and I'm one of those dickheads that's lived in Korea for a year and can only say "hi" and "Thank you" in Korean (just recently I've learned "sit down" and also figured out "yes" and "no"...getting there slowly!).  I was using Google Translate to explain where I needed to go, and when he was telling me things (in Korean) that I thought were equal to where I was needing to go, I was grunting at him.  I only realized that I did it when he mimicked my grunt and started laughing.  I realized that I grunt at people ALL the time.  I'm going to work on changing the "grunt" to saying "neh", which is "yes" in Korean.  So instead of sounding like a gorilla, I'll sound like a horse!

I always pick up other people's speech habits and tones and unconsciously mimic them.  So if you ever catch me doing it, I'm not being an asshole...it just happens.  If I grunt at you, I'm saying "yes".  If I ask you if you're alright, I'm greeting you.  It's when I don't say anything at all that you should turn and run the other way ;)

Maybe the next habit I'll pick up is the "khuu, khuu, khuu" of Orson smashing his beetles with a rock...

(^^ POINTS to you, if you get that reference! ^^)

Happy Trails!

P.S. Apologies for not having a song assigned to this blog.  I've got Patsy Cline running through my head (you can thank Kate Austin for that... < more points if you get THAT reference!)...and Patsy has nothing to do with this blog.