Eventually, a diagnosis
On Wednesday afternoon after the MRI, a police officer phoned me telling me that the eyewitnesses pretty well agreed with what I remembered happening, to wit, the car turning left without checking his mirrors or anything. Then he asked me for my license and insurance information and I was a bit incapable of getting to my bag. I told him I’d send a friend around with them later.
As it turns out, my friend Drew stopped by, and he offered to take the information round to the police station that very night, and while he was at it, see if he could find my bike and assess what damage it had suffered.
He took the information to the police and showed the officer the video from my helmet camera, which showed that even though the driver had had his turn signals on, he had made no sign of even bothering to check his mirrors or the intersection for safety before turning. Bad driver.
Then he went to find the bike, and found it in a closed construction site. He snuck in, and then did a bit of an inspection of the bike. Here is the complete list of damage he found:
- Broken clutch lever
- Bent shifter
That’s it!
The shift lever was bent
The police officer had warned him that the front fork was likely to have gotten bent (which would be a bike-writing-off bit of damage, generally), but not even that had happened. It was nearly roadworthy.
Then a doctor showed up to check up on me, but he hadn’t seen my X-rays, CT scan or MRI data. But at least he managed to take my temperature and blood pressure!
Thursday started out with not a bad breakfast, and people checking up on me seemingly every hour to take my temperature and ask me how much I could move the foot on my broken leg.
Turns out I could move the foot on my broken leg just fine, so I thought that that was a good thing. Turns out, I arrived at that conclusion prematurely. They were just checking how much it could move now so they had a baseline to compare it to later. But I get ahead of myself.
The morning proceeded without any word from my surgeon (this is the sort of thing I’ve since learned to get used to). Eventually word came round that I was to be prepped for surgery on Friday, so I was wheeled over to the pre-op shower room to have a good thorough shower (lying on my back, while two nurses did the job). That sort of convinced me that I may as well give up any further pretense of dignity until at least I was mobile again. After the shower, one of the nurses got out a red Sharpie and drew a red arrow on my left foot to make sure the surgeon operated on the proper foot.
Also, the anaesthesia procedure was explained to me. Since it was a spinal anaesthesia, I would be conscious throughout the whole thing. I was advised (literally) to bring a Walkman. I figured I’d bring one of those more modern things which can also make phone calls. If the phone functionality was going to be a problem, I could always turn it off after all.
I was advised to have my primary contact available while the surgery was explained to me, so I asked Drew if he minded coming up, and he said, “No, of course not”…and arrived on my bike. It wasn’t until he’d been here a while that he mentioned that, though. Turns out his own bike was on the fritz, so he took mine instead, because at least it went, damage or not. Since the bike had gotten a taste of blood, it tried to get into an accident playing chicken with a Mercedes, explained Drew.
Eventually the doctor showed up and said, “So why don’t we go to my office so I can explain this to you properly?” I pointed out why we wouldn’t be going to his office, and he looked a bit crestfallen, as if that was something which he’d just forgotten about. He said, “Sorry, I’ll be right back,” disappeared, and came back a few minutes later with a bunch of papers.
He said, “You have a depressed fibia platform fracture combined with a standard fracture a little further down your fibia. I’ve seen this kind of thing quite a few times before though, and I’m confident that I can fix you up. Also, I would advice that you let me do this surgery on you, because if you don’t let me, you will never walk again.” Oh. That sounded like more of a threat, really, but I guess he was just stating facts.
He showed me a print-out of the CT scan, and it looked pretty gruesome (CT scans of bone injuries always look particularly gruesome though). He also showed me an X-ray, showing how the top part of the tibia now resembled not so much a fibia as a sort of malignant toadstool.
CT scans always look gruesome
He explained what the surgical procedure would entail-essentially, this:
A rough explanation of the surgery, with scribbles
He’d push the depressed bit of bone back up to where it’s supposed to be (that’s what the hammer represents) and then he’d sort of fill it up with artificial-bone putty. Then he’d screw a titanium plate to the broken-off bit to put it back in the right place, and while he was at it, he’d keep on screwing the titanium plate in further down to handle the other fracture. Almost exactly this:
I guess this fracture really is quite common
Also, as required by law, he went through a complete list of risks of the operation-there were 10 of them in told, including #10 “unforseen complications”. One of my favorite ones was “Economy Class syndrome,” or deep-vein thrombosis. Other risks included bleeding (duh), stiffness if I don’t participate fully in physiotherapy, and the rather frightening “surgeon error” (but on the other hand, before the practise of carefully labeling which parts to operate on, people did occasionally get the wrong limbs amputated, so you can’t be too careful).
So all of the relevant disclaimers and consent forms signed, he said, “Right, surgery should start at 2pm, unless I’m running late” and swept out of the room.