I've spent a lot of time, hours and hours over the past 11 months reading every blog, every forum I could find. I've read medical journals that required me learning lots of new words. Fancy words like osteochondral, and proprioception, and brostrum. After all of that I still don't feel extremely hopeful about recovery. I'm really hoping that this is mostly because the people who are healed are out living their lives. They aren't stuck at home, struggling to walk and so they end up spending their time talking about their injury on the computer. Who knows? Maybe I'll be one of the 46% who have a good outcome and my blog will be a ray of hope for the next unsuspecting victim.
So, let's start at the beginning. It was a beautiful day, St Patrick's Day to be exact, and we were headed to the library and then we were going to have a picnic at the playground. We got there too early and decided to play at the park while we waited for the library to open. My son wanted to play tag, so we did. He's a pretty speedy little guy so I decided to jump the last two stairs...that was dumb. One second I was in the air and the next I was on the ground and in the most shocking pain I've ever felt before. I screamed my husband's name repeatedly, getting louder and higher pitched each time I screamed it. Thank goodness it was early morning so no one really saw my epic screamfest.
It took a few minutes but I did manage to stop writhing around in pain. I sat up and looked down and knew we were going to the hospital. I needed crutches, no way around that. Thankfully we were just down the street from the ER! By the time we got there it looked like I had a softball in my ankle. The lady who wheeled me in said she would be really surprised if it wasn't broken. I got my xrays and was told it was just a bad sprain. They gave me crutches and motrin and sent me on my way. I was feeling okay at this point. I had sprained my other ankle in high school and recovered pretty quickly. My only annoyance was that we lived on the 3rd floor with no elevator. I crawled up those concrete stairs praying that none of our neighbors would leave or arrive while I was in there.
This is the fancy picture they drew in my medical records. It's disturbingly accurate.
