What Happened Inside My Leg?
The healing process continues. I’m off of crutches and using a cane. My thigh bone is very nearly completely healed. Now I am working on rebuilding the muscles in my right leg. Due to four months of not using any muscles, my right leg is mush. But the muscle is coming back fairly quickly. At my last visit, the doctor hinted that I might be able to get rid of the cane after about two weeks.
Now that the the major physical worries are over, I have some time to reflect a bit on the injuries.
After I slammed into the concrete pole on 23 September 2006 and rolled along the ground for a bit, my right thigh bone looked like this:
The fact that my femur broke into four large pieces and several smaller chunks most likely saved me from a compound fracture with bones jamming through my skin, major soft tissue damage, and blood pouring everywhere.
Surgery several hours after the accident fixed the break. The doctors but in a titanium plate and 11 screws. Apparently a drill bit broke off during the surgery, which I didn’t know about until months later. The post surgery leg looked like this on 23 September 2006 (the staples running up the side of my leg are visible):
I was discharged from the hospital five weeks later. Seven days after being released from the hospital, I went for x-rays and a check up on 4 November 2006. I took the x-rays, but the doctor was not available on that day to review the x-rays. What no one knew was that the titanium plate in my leg had cracked:
Note the few stray bone fragments. They are buried deep in my muscle tissue and will remain there forever.
The next morning, 5 November 2006, I woke up, and when I moved my right leg, my thigh bowed up like an upside down “U”. I didn’t know why it did that. It didn’t hurt, so I rationalized that it was something do to with the muscle.
The next morning, 6 November 2006, my leg was not any better. I went to the hospital to find out what was wrong. The doctor looked at X-ray taken two days earlier and exclaimed “Oh shit!” He told me the plate had broken and that my bone had re-broken. He immediately re-admitted me to the hospital and sent me down for more x-rays. My leg looked like this:
From another angle:
Well…that explained why my thigh was shaped like an upside down “U” when I moved it.
I underwent my second surgery to remove the broken plate, saw about 1cm off my thigh bone to make the ends flat, screw on a new, lager, wider, thicker plate, and to graft some bone from my thigh onto my leg. After surgery on 7 November 2006, the new plate looks like this (The broken drill bit can be seen in this picture):
