8 minutes and 50 seconds

Thanks to V-L for keeping everyone updated the past few days. The job has now fallen to my parents, although I am trying to write this to see if they can just post it. If you’re reading this then the experiment is working and pictures might even follow.

WARNING NEXT PARAGRAPH NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH

Last night, I saw lefty again for the first time unbandaged. Late in the afternoon my doctor showed up with her minions and declared it time for the change of the cryovac thing. They kindly warned me that it would hurt and that she had to move slowly so as not to injure anything under the wound. Proceed as slowly as you need to I thought, not damaging the artery is a good thing. They then loaded me up on dilaudid (high power pain killer) and proceeded to slowly open up the vacuum dressing. I found it fascinating to see all that stuff right there and looked on as though looking at someone else’s foot. Like I said there was a lot of dilaudid involved. After that they applied a new dressing, then new black spongy material and covered it with the vacuum stuff and attached the vacuum thing again. Now for those who have any clue about what it looks like to use a FoodSaver vaccum system, especially when done on carefully prepared Thanksgiving dinner rolls, can somewhat imagine how it looks when a 4 inch thick sponge all of sudden shrinks down to about ½ an inch with the application of vacuum. That is what happened to my foot, totally surreal, especially through the drug induced haze. So now my foot is safely vacuumed again and back in the boot contraption and ready for primetime- well almost on the last one.

This morning the peppy PT lady came by and lead me on a walk around the ward of the hospital and go over my exercises. Yesterday we only made it about half way, but today was the day to go the whole way. I made it exhausted by the end, but made it all the same. She then also suggested that I could make another lap in the aafternoon. So, if anyone knows anything about my competitive nature you can imagine that of course I took the second walk, walker and all and I even timed myself- hey what else if a highly competitive type A person supposed to do when confined to a bed for all but a few minutes a day. So, it took 8 min and 50 seconds for me to make a lap around my ward, a lap that should take less then a minute, but hey I did it twice in a day. So, heres to that.

The waiting game of the moment is for the pathology from the surgery. Once we have that we’ll be able to finalize the next phase of the plans and start to have some clue about when I can come home. Thank you so much to everyone for their support. Hopefully, we’ll know something in the next day or two.

The new substitute blogger, Ray or dad, doing this in Starbucks to gain internet access was not able to post this prewritten blog in 8 Minutes and 50 seconds.