Most everyone knows that we had a wonderful, adventurous, and amazing summer…so in the spirit of trying to document it all, this one “little tiny” thing couldn’t go unmentioned….
It is the end of our first week at the beach and we have two more to go. We were on the dock behind the house fishing into the canal. I had my camera with me so that I could get some great shots of the boys. I stepped around Davy towards the end so that I could get a picture of all three of them in my frame and that’s when Davy flung his fishing pole backwards to cast it in. I however was not paying attention and proceeded to step back out-of-the-way and stepped right off of the dock. In my mind everything slowed down as I was having the realization of “oh crud, I’m going into the canal and am going to get wet”, so I threw the camera up onto the dock so it wouldn’t get ruined. The drop was roughly 6 feet and you would think that the water would be deep, but it wasn’t. It was probably 1 1/2-2 ft deep. I landed on my left foot, heard my knee pop, and then curled up into the fetal position as I wanted to drown from the pain.
At this point, I am in such shock of the pain (which by the way is unlike anything I have ever felt) that Andy is yelling at me to get up and I can’t even really hear him. In old cartoons, when the character hurts itself you see stars circling around its head, well I saw stars flashing everywhere. My leg hurt so bad that at the time my knee just felt like I had barely bumped it on something. I finally respond to Andy that I couldn’t stand up, and my sweet husband thinks it is because the water is too deep. He jumps in…right into the oyster beds. We are lucky that he only suffered the scrapes all over his feet and ankles because he easily could have done some damage too.
Five weeks prior Andy had shoulder surgery, so the question now is…”How am I going to get out of the canal?” There was no chance of me putting even the slightest amount of weight on my left foot, so I couldn’t get up the dock ladder unless I jumped from rung to rung. That was to hard and I was shaking (and crying) too much. We call Kelly down from the house, she leans over the edge of the dock to grab me, Andy hoists me up onto his good shoulder, and with one pushing and one pulling I’m finally out and on the dock. Still crying, I could have just laid there forever.
A lump the size of a mango began to form over my left ankle, so Andy decides that he is taking me straight to Blake Medical ER. Andy and Brian lift me up and carry me to the car. 😦
I ended up breaking the fibula straight across, with another slight crack above it. You’ll see on the x-ray that only the top of the crack displaced so we didn’t need to put a pin in…thank goodness. Once we got to the ortho and he reviewed the films, he found another fissure crack on the inner ankle bone. After being wrapped up, the Ortho decides on a walking boot. I am so glad for many reasons, but the obvious were that 1. I could shower and 2. My foot swelled so bad (I swear it was the size of a football) that I kept having to loosen it. A hard cast wouldn’t have allowed that.
I have to give a shout out to my husband here, because in the ER I was crying so bad, shaking, teeth chattering and all that he decided we had waited long enough for pain medicine so he began stalking the hallway. There is something about a 6 foot 5 man hovering in a hallway that eventually has people stopping and asking if they can help you. Pain pills arrived! Yipee!
By the time we got home and went to bed, I woke up several hours later back in fierce pain and realizing that my knee hurts more than I originally thought. It won’t straighten at all. Andy encouraged me to bring it up with the Ortho and he ended up doing an MRI. I severely bruised the bone and tore part of my ACL… 😦
So now I’m on crutches, with a heavy boot that I can’t put any weight on. The house is on stilts and being at the beach all I could think about was sand all over this black boot. For the first week, I didn’t really leave the house and I was so thankful for Brian and Kelly taking care of my boys. They took them boating, to the Aquarium, movies, and to the beach. She fed them, cared for them (and me), and essentially had six kids for the week…seven if you count my inability to do anything. After the first week Andy ended up moving to the house full-time and taking off from work. I was so thankful for him too and the boys loved him being there. I eventually made it out to the beach with a garbage bag wrapped over the boot, it was so hot…but very functional.
It wasn’t the trip that we had dreamed of over the last year, but it was still a wonderful trip…just a little bit of a different one. 🙂
Well I am now writing this 8 weeks out and I still limp, my knee still won’t open, and my ankle is sooo stiff. All in all I know that it is healing and I am so thankful because we all know that it could have been so much worse… 🙂
Mountains! Beach! or Both!... 