I gained valuable insights that I am eager to share with anyone considering a Taylor Spatial Frame or similar external fixator as an elective surgery. In no particular order, here are a few things I learned along the way…
The countdown is on- today marks nine days left until they remove this thing from my foot. I’m excited, but another part of me is scared and I know that I will miss this in some odd, difficult to explain way. I have only a little over a week left to put the enormity of my lessons and experiences down in writing before it is over. Over the last four and a half months, I gained valuable insights that I am eager to share with anyone considering a Taylor Spatial Frame or similar external fixator as an elective surgery. In no particular order, here are a few things I learned along the way… Continue reading “Things I Wish They’d Told Me”
Love makes hard things easy, makes weak people strong, and makes the most difficult parts of our lives the happiest.
I couldn’t have done this without Patrick.
He scoffs at this when I tell him, but I remind him that I simply WOULDN’T have done this without him. I had no intention of even trying to change this foot before I met him, and it was only upon his eager insistence, his unwavering optimism, and his highly convincing confidence that I was persuaded it was possible.
Early on in my married life, I came to realize the myth that all a woman has to do is sit around waiting for a prince to show up and take care of her was just that- a myth. With two children in diapers, I made the decision to take my family’s financial future into my own hands and started my degree program in Engineering. I was allowed to do this on the strict caveat that it was not allowed to cost my husband a dime. I took out loans, both subsidized and unsubsidized, finagled the department to give me a few scholarships, and gratefully relied on my little sister’s generosity as she babysat for me. My husband at the time was not the sort to get up at night with a baby, so I was still a full time mother and housewife the entire time. By the time I graduated and got a job, I was accustomed to doing everything without help- planning for my family’s future, taking care of the kids, buying and selling homes and stock investments and running the household- everything. After I left my husband, my load didn’t really get heavier, but my confidence fell and I had to learn how to do everything alone without even a cheerleader to believe in me. And so I did.
But over the past year, Patrick has taught me to let go of the reins a bit and learn to accept a little help. I still struggle with it, but there isn’t much I can do about it these days with a cage on my foot. In the hospital, he slept sideways in a recliner, his head lolling over one arm of the chair and a leg haphazardly drooped over the other. He woke instantly at the slightest sound to ask how I was doing and ran out to chase down a nurse every once in a while. He stayed right at my elbow as the physical therapist forced me to walk up and down stairs and back and forth along the hallway on my crutches before signing off on my release.
When we arrived home from the hospital, he was too worried I would fall and instead carried me up two flights of stairs like a baby in his arms. He has managed all of the instructions from the doctors as I’ve been too drugged at most of our appointments to comprehend their conversations, and he has completely commandeered control of my medications. (The two times I have taken this into my own hands so far I took the wrong dose and
didn’t write down the time.) He cooks for me, makes me coffee every morning, does all the housekeeping and laundry, and watches all five of the children.
Our evening ritual.
Of all of these chores, however, by far the kindest and most difficult is my pin care. Pin care is vital to prevent infection and will occur every day until my frame is removed. If performed improperly, the skin around the pins may heal wrong and cause tenting, a situation where the skin grows up around the wire in a cone and leads to skin tearing and irritation with any movement. If all of the drainage and scabbing is not removed each day, infection can brew and in no time this can lead to a deeper infection which may tract to the bone. Nearly every complication with a Taylor Spatial Frame results from problems with the pin sites and most of these can be prevented with adequate pin care.
Clean and healthy pin site.
Each evening after the kids have been put to bed, I take a shower and soak my leg with the frame in water. I am only allowed to use Dial antibacterial soap and I lather up my knee as I sit on my shower bench and rinse the soap down my leg over the pins. When I’m done, I towel-dry the frame and use a fan or blow dryer to dry the rest of the droplets. I lay down in bed with my leg elevated on a one foot-high foam wedge pillow and Patrick takes over. Using a sterile cotton-tipped applicator and sterile saline, he must diligently scrub each pin and gently push the skin back from the wire all the way around. Each pin requires a fresh applicator which must be opened from sterile packaging. After the first few cleanings, the pin sites were inflamed and irritated; even gentle pressure hurt immensely and with each of my gasps he would stop
and catch his own breath, visibly upset at the pain he was causing me. He must watch for infection and monitor each bruise and blister closely to report it the doctor, and sometimes this involves tracing a line around a reddened area to see if it spreads or snapping a photo to email to my doctor. Once each pin has been cleaned, he places dry gauze carefully around
An irritated pin site- excruciatingly painful with each movement.
each of the pins which are still draining and tightens the plastic clip on the wire to put pressure on the dressing. When this is finished, he turns the struts. There are six of them and the changes have gotten larger as the ankle has now been separated and we are beginning the movements to raise my toes and lower my heel. He turns the dials slowly on each strut for fear of hurting me, but I groan and gasp anyway.
The entire process takes about an hour and we have a pretty good system now. He puts Bob’s Burgers on to distract me and we laugh and make fun of each other the whole time. If you don’t know Patrick, you don’t know that he is not good with these things. He cannot stand gore and his idea of what constitutes gore is pretty pathetic on my scale. While I knew I could count on him to get the door for me and help out with cooking, I honestly thought I’d be on my own with most of the raw and dirty medical procedures.
Turning the struts- that one in the back needs a little help sometimes.
But love is odd.
Love makes hard things easy, makes weak people strong, and makes the most difficult parts of our lives the happiest. It makes a man who hates the site of blood buck up and take over without comment or complaint because he doesn’t want me to struggle on my own. It makes a woman who likes to complain bite her tongue when it hurts because I don’t want him to worry that he’s hurting me.
I can’t walk, I have a monstrosity on my foot that rivals some of the best horror movie props, and I have never been happier in my life. Thanks to love.
I remember getting my first pap smear when I was sixteen. I didn’t take my bra off, which confused the doctor who just shook his head quickly at the nurse and said not to worry about it. I was so obviously mortified by nudity that he stopped trying to make conversation about halfway through and just got in and out as quickly as possible.
Those were the days. Sometimes I miss my dignity and self-respect. After a couple of decades filled with multiple surgeries and childbirths, I don’t really remember what modesty feels like anymore. I suppose every woman gets that way as she ages; dropping her panties and spreading them for public viewing just becomes an old habit. Right now, though, I am feeling pretty lucky that regularly occurring indignities no longer phase me.
Narcotics are amazing. If you have pain- I mean real pain, the kind that won’t let you focus on anything else- narcotics can be your savior. At 23, fresh out of the hospital with a bandaged splint on my right leg and a skin graft site covering my left cheek, I was grateful for the existence of narcotics as well as my mother’s insistence that I take them on schedule to avoid the pain all together. Wise advice from a seasoned RN. She failed to mention that narcotics have a miserable side effect though: Constipation. I can’t recall how many days went by before I finally told her in tears that I couldn’t go to the bathroom to save my life and things were starting to get dire. You would think by this point I’d have had no secrets left from her. This is the same caretaker who had catheterized me herself in the hospital and was at this point blow-drying my naked rear end twice a day to speed the graft site healing. Still, I waited to enlist her help until I couldn’t wait any longer.
Fleet enema. (Not the actual bottle used in this story.)
My mother is a saint. She patiently explained to me that this was very common with narcotics and gave me some stool softeners and calmed me down. When this failed to do the trick and instead exacerbated an already somewhat urgent situation, she ran to the store to buy a Fleet enema.
If you’ve never had an enema before…screw you. I don’t how your karma is so great to have avoided this major life milestone, but I’m certain it will catch up with you. I’m off-topic. An enema is either water-based or oil-based and is essentially just a big squirt bottle full of liquid to be injected directly into your rectum. Once it is in there, it breaks up whatever stool is causing a blockage and lubricates the pathway to enable you to poop. It’s not rocket science, but it’s effective. In order for this to work, however, you have to squeeze your anus closed and not let anything out until it has been in there long enough to accomplish something. This is the hardest part since after days without a bowel movement your lower intestines are already full to bursting and adding more liquid to the mix just makes it worse.
I very vividly remember laying on my side in tears in my mother’s bathroom as she pulled my cheeks apart and squirted the Fleet enema in, the whole time saying urgently, “Now don’t let it come out!” I laid that way for about fifteen minutes until I couldn’t stand it and leapt for the toilet. Thankfully, it worked, but it was a few days before I wanted any more than a liquid diet.
My relationship with excrement has pretty much gone downhill from there. Once I had children, my definition of gross changed drastically on the day I found myself sitting in a college classroom certain that I could smell poop. I checked the bottom of my shoes and starting looking around at the people next to me to find the offender. Eventually I noticed the smell got stronger every time my hand came near my face… I turned my hand over and sure enough, there was a line of baby poop smeared up the side right below my pinky finger.
Fast forward a decade and now I have a few more experiences with narcotics under my belt. I’ve learned to avoid my previous pitfall for the most part with proper supplements and diet, but the narcotics I was on following my recent surgery were stronger than anything I’ve had since my original illness; I simply wasn’t prepared. It was five days before I finally broke it to Patrick I hadn’t gone to the bathroom. We were on our way in to my post-op follow-up appointment and I had just thrown up the entire contents of my stomach. The doctor was concerned enough by my admission to call in the advice nurse who specializes in such things; the advice nurse seemed very concerned. I was weak, my pallor was poor, and my stomach wasn’t letting anything else in until I fixed this. The nurse was very concerned and advised us to go the emergency room if this went any longer. Since we were in the area, and already had a nice hospital wheelchair, we went straight to the emergency room from the doctor’s office.
Constipation does not rate high on the triage scale, unfortunately, and after one failed Fleet’s during which I sat on the toilet while the nurse haphazardly stabbed the tip of the bottle around squeezing oil all over my rear end, we waited with no further assistance and no resolution for a couple of hours. Waiting is one my least favorite things, right behind waiting with snakes. So we went home.
My mother was at home watching all of the children, and had earlier purchased a Fleet enema in anticipation of this very moment. As mothers do. We ushered Patrick out of the bedroom and I laid on my side positioned so Mom could reach the sink for warm water while I kept my foot elevated on a pillow. As she pulled my cheeks apart, I raised my head, smiled lovingly at her, and said, “Wow, this is just like old times.” Thank you, Fleet, for bringing mothers and daughters together for generations.
