And now comes the boring part
Car crashes and surgery are very exciting and all, but after the dramatic bit, there’s this long, slow, dreadfully-boring process called recovery. With its considerably-more-tedious cousin paperwork.
The paperwork has been in the form of the clerk at the insurance company that holds the policy for the car that ran me over. The office I’ve been dealing with is in Takasaki, which is in Gunma, which is where the company that owns the car which hit me is based in. Apparently Takasaki drivers never have congestion. I’m envious.
Come to think of it, whenever I’ve been there, I’ve never encountered any congestion. Certainly never to the point where I’ve ever had to do any filtering. Maybe that’s why the guy from there never figured that there’d be more than one person in his lane. He could have taken out anyone at all-it’s just that I drew the short straw this time. It almost makes me wish that someone ahead of me had taken the hit, because then I’d have the entire incident on camera instead of just the stuff right ahead of me. But if someone else had been hit, he’d have likely been hurt considerably worse than I was, on account of all of the protective gear that I wear, which most Japanese people don’t.
So this insurance-company clerk has been calling me up and asking me about things like the company I work at and the hospital I’ve been admitted to and various things like that. She seems to have a set of preconceptions, unfortunately-for instance, she asked me whether I was working at a junior high school or a high school. I’m not sure what impression she’d gotten when I told her I worked at a company with the word “Internet” in its name. Some sort of online English-teacher services?
Eventually-and we’re talking over the course of a number of days-I think I’ve finally got her believing that working for the System Division, Service Development Department does not involve teaching anyone how to speak English. When it finally sank in, I could actually audibly hear her face go pale-suddenly the payout for lost wages got quite a lot larger than she’d thought it would have been. Especially when I told her the quite-prestigious address of the company I work at.
Enough about paperwork, though.
I’ve been eased into some measure of physiotherapy. When I came out of that horrible night after the operation, my left foot was, more-or-less, absent, at least as far as I was concerned. I mean, it was still yelling pain at me, in an unuseful way, but otherwise it had no feeling, no movement, and was about the size and color of a beef liver.
My dressings, having started out loose, had on account of the ridiculous swelling which had been happening, become ridiculously tight, so that my entire leg looked like an Ace-bandage sausage. Fortunately, a doctor and a retinue of assistants stopped by my bed in the morning to change the dressings. While they were at it, I snapped a picture of my naked leg just because of the staggering number of staples in it.
You can thank me later for waiting until they’d cleaned all of the blood off the leg before taking that picture. I counted 57 staples there. The drain was quite a nice touch too-I managed to fill up two bottles of blood the first night, one bottle the next day, then half a bottle the next two days. Yuk. But I understand the purpose.
There are so many incisions because the alternative would have been to make one gigantic incision going all the way down my leg, and as the surgeon explained to me, We’re Smarter Than That These days. There’s one incision to install the front plate and a selection of screws to hold it in place, another incision to install the rear plate and a selection of screws to hold that in place, two small incisions for endoscopic cameras so he can see exactly what’s going on in there without to have things wide open, and the lower incision to finish installing the bolts for the large, main plate.
They kept me basically nonstop in bed for the next few days after the operation. I was literally tied to the bed-the drip stand kept me tied to one side, and the drain from the operation site kept me tied to the other. On Monday they finally finished pumping IV drugs into me, and on Tuesday they finally decided to take out the drain. Today, they decided that the drain entrance had cleared up enough that they only need cover it up with a bit of plastic bandage.
So now even though I’m the one with the worst injuries in the room I’m staying in, I have the least amount of dressing. I guess that’s because my “cast” is mostly internal, and everything external is just by way of incisions to install the cast.
Yesterday they finally pushed me out of bed, by way of forcing me to have a seat in a wheelchair while eating lunch, instead of doing so comfortably (okay, not so comfortably) in bed. I hadn’t quite figured out how much I dared bend my knee, for example, so I was still keeping my leg ruler-straight in the wheelchair which is made for, let’s not put too fine a point on it, people with much shorter legs than mine. Then I brushed my teeth and went to the bathroom. Let me tell you, eating lunch, brushing my teeth and going to the bathroom were the most difficult things I’ve ever done.
Later on in the evening, I ventured out in the wheelchair again to buy some drinks from a vending machine. The worst thing that happened there was I couldn’t hold the drinks I’d bought on my lap as I wheeled myself back to my room.
One of the things I’ve been learning while trying to get into and out of wheelchairs is that if anyone tries to help, they’re not helping. They’re pulling my duff leg in ways I don’t want to go, or they’re doing things too fast, or too slow-all I want them to do is put the wheelchair under my butt if it’s not there, or take it away when I’m getting up. Which is at least part of why it was a hundred times harder to mount and dismount the wheelchair the first few times-people kept solicitously helping, when all I wanted them to do was to let me take care of as much as possible myself.
This morning featured my first session of formal physiotherapy (or rehabilitation as it’s known here). First I was strapped into a machine which moved my leg back and forth, bending my knee more and less by degrees. I got about an hour in the knee bender. Then I had another 20-minute session with the physiotherapist, who painfully pointed out that while my leg was now incredibly stiff, it wasn’t actually nearly as stiff as I’d thought.
Tomorrow and the next day each feature two sessions on the knee-bending machine, and another session with the physiotherapist. And then there’s at least another week in the hospital before they decide if they can give me a pair of crutches and a cast, and discharge me back into the world.