Ruminations in Korea

Time for a bit of an update.

After about a week out of the the hospital things were going well. My physical therapy went well. Progress was made. My physical checkups went well.

On Saturday, 4 November 2006, I went in for my scheduled check up. They took x-rays. However, because the doctor’s wife was giving birth, he was out of the hospital and not able to keep the appointment. It was rescheduled for Wednesday, 8 November.

Saturday went well.. I went to work as usually, enjoyed a relaxing evening at home, and stayed up late doing work on the computer.

When I woke up Sunday morning, there was a huge bulge in the thigh muscles of my right leg muscle. It was right in the group of muscles that I had been stretching most the previous day. My leg hurt a lot. I thought it was just very sore muscles from the extra exercise I did the day before. So, I lounged in bed and took it easy for a while.

Finally, I had to get up and go to the bathroom. When I sat up, it was incredibly painful to move my right leg. I eventually got it off the end of the bed. When I went to stand up, my thigh flexed into a very high arch. That wasn’t good.

I rationalized that I would contine to lounge around in bed and if it wasn’t better, I would go to the hospital in the morning. It wasn’t better, so I went to the hospital on Monday morning.

The doctor looked at the x-rays as I went into his office. As I prepared to sit down, he said, “Shit!” in English and ordered me not to sit down. He showed me the x-ray taken saturday morning….the titanium plate in my leg and cracked and broken - and rebroken my leg in the process….that explained the big arch in my thigh.

He said that he would start the hospital re-admittance process while I went down for current x-rays. After standing there for about five minutes, I had come within a few heartbeats of fainting, so I laid me out on his table while waiting for a mobile table to take me to the x-ray room.

The new x-rays showed that my leg was indeed broken again.and that the old titanium plate would have to be removed and replaced.

I underwent surgery again on the morning of Tuesday, 7 November. They took out the broken plate and replaced it with a new, longer and bigger titanium plate, then also took a chunk of bone from my hip, crushed it up into some sort of mush, and grafted it onto the broken bits of my femur. They also cut about one centimeter of bone out of the middle of my femur where it was broken and put the flatened ends of the bone together.

So, the long and short of things are that I am in the hospital again for at least the next 6 weeks, going through exactly that same thing I just went through, but longer and more painful.

The broken plate was sent to the manufacturer for testing and investigation. I am not holding my breath that the company will make any admission that their product was faulty.