Second Appointment

So I had my second appointment this morning. Nothing new with the left ankle, although the CT scan from Friday definitely shows the fracture (and it's deeper than i expected). The CT scan also shows that the fracture is ever so slightly displaced. Dr. Idjadi gave me the option of surgery and screws to get it a tiny bit less displaced. He joked that he loves to do surgery, and would be happy to cut me open and screw some bones together. But the risks associated with surgery (many) seem to far outweigh the gains to be made (very small). We agreed that we should just let it continue to heal in the cast, and only consider surgery if things somehow (unlikely) get displaced in the future.



The right ankle is progressing right along. Swelling continues to recede (you can see the wrinkles in my skin that are forming as the swelling goes down). Huge fracture blisters were still present, so Dr. Idjadi de-roofed them (or whatever the fancy name is for cutting off the top of a blister).



We did learn something interesting from the CT scan, however. We thought that the piece of bone that is missing from my right tibia had been left behind on the mountain. Instead, it appears that, during the injury, that piece migrated all the way across my joint and is now sitting near the bottom of my left fibula. This is at least a portion of the bone we were going to inspect and possibly reattach with surgery. Dr. Idjadi has never seen anything quite like this before, nor has anyone else in his office. Great - just what I wanted to be: a journal article.

So part of surgery will be to inspect this larger chunk of bone. If it's not too mangled, we'll probably reopen the inside of my ankle and reattach it to my tibia. This opens another can of worms though, because, when the piece wasn't found during the initial surgery, the tendon or ligament that normally attached to it was re-anchored to the broken end of my tibia. Anyway, no decisions can be made until Dr. Idjadi can look at the fragment and determine where it goes and if it's still useful.



Things look good enough with my right ankle that my surgery has been tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday. Another appointment this Friday will reassess if that remains appropriate.