And Then I Broke My Baby Toe

Healing at home: my little anti-pronation, broken toe splinting get up. 

I was wondering, as my days became dull almost immediately upon my return home, what else I was going to write about.

I will tell you about my time on the orthopaedic surgery ward. 

My roommate, Catherine, and Jonathan, a "long-term" (meaning, I think, more than two nights) patient on the floor, were both waiting to transfer to other care facilities. Both were suffering from more than just recent joint surgery. And they dominated my experience on the ward.

Catherine had been brought to my room from elsewhere in the ward and was having trouble adjusting to the change.  

Even with a caregiver and a nurse in the room with her at the time, she fell - rendering nugatory the ward's recent accomplishment of 60 days without a fall. After that, they gave her something to calm her down but she stayed agitated the entire night.

This was due in part to Jonathan who sat right outside the door to my room. Jonathan talked. Loud, unending, often very angry-sounding monologues, in Polish or Ukrainian or something. The only word he said that I recognized was "Pakistan." Once he got started, he would go for hours. 

He was our Muzak. He ran day and night.

During that first night on the ward, Catherine would drop off to sleep and Jonathan would start hollering again, starting her awake. She would call for help and struggle to get out of bed. She demanded to know what was happening in her house.

Poor thing.

So, between these two, I didn't get much of a first night's sleep. The second night was calmer, with only one incident. The ward team gave Catherine a suppository and then gave her something to help her sleep. They forgot to put a diaper on her, so I was awakened by the sounds - and smells - of a hospital team cleaning up a befouled bed.

On the third night, they moved me to that private room I'd been longing for. Weapons grade laxative was what kept me up that night.

The sad saga of Catherine and Jonathan was all I had to tell you, and then I broke my toe.

That went like this.  

I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to, plus a few other things, like rigging the foot of my operated leg to counteract its inclination to flop out to the right, which is a Schedule A DON'T DO after hip surgery. This is more comfortable than it looks. And it helps keep my foot pointed in the right direction.

The work I've been doing has paid off. I already have more mobility, less swelling and pain, more strength in my operated leg.

So I got a little cocky. This morning I was using my cane (not my walker) to walk ellipses around the master bedroom - and was doing very nicely thank you - when I lost track of where everything was and stubbed my left baby toe on the cane.

I looked down. My baby toe pointed north while all the others pointed east. My first thought was, "how am I going to put on a shoe?" My next was "emergency wards don't do anything for broken toes." And then "so I guess I'll have to fix this myself." And "how much is this going to hurt?"

So I gently took my toe and moved it so that it pointed in the right direction. There was no pain at all. I then splinted the toe with some medical tape and the adjoining toe, finished my physio and sheepishly descended the stairs. Once down the stairs, I added the support of a good pair of slippers to my poor little toe.

It is just so stupid that the foot on my good leg is now going to take longer to heal, and cause more pain, than my operated leg.

Today's moral: don't get cocky.

Thanks for reading!

Karen