Congratulations on making it this far dear reader, so far I have bombarded you with non stop pain, misery and self loathing. But that is how it happened, that is my story. So far it has been a shit storm of epic proportions.
Every now and again I get news of someone else doing it tough, tougher than me and I have to self check that I am not just a complete whining little prick but honestly I think it has been justified. What I have been through has been horrific, and none of this pain story, trauma diary is amplified or embiggened by fiction. It honestly hasn't. I have tried through this whole journey to internalise it as much as possible to shield the people around me, most of all Scotty, but so much of it has seeped out, countless surgeries, so much anaesthetic, so many pain killers, dark depression, it does thing to a person.
Good job I was already a resilient motherfucker because I felt like giving up at so many different points, I really did. I just wanted it to end. It got to the point there months back before we discovered the new surgeon that I just thought this can't actually be happening. No one can get through this on their own, can they? Pandemic, leg torn off and stuck back on with titanium and just told to bear it.
But I did.
I had to.
And it was only through consistent pressure on the medical professionals helping me and the sheer will of Scotty that we found alternatives, sought out alternate therapies and some really good friends keeping me going that we got there. Here. We got here.
Where is here? Well, it is now mid November 2021, I have a half leg cast on and Scotty had his 60th birthday. He hates birthdays and this one most of all because it is a significant number and he just turned down every opportunity to celebrate it and stuck by me.
I got him a gangster gold necklace because I honestly thought it would suit him but he turned it down, took me back to the shop I went to on my knee scooter and demanded they returned it. Luckily for me and him I guess it didn't really fit his rather thick neck despite being the longest one they had! I had to have a secret laugh to myself about that, and he got a much, much less expensive simple gold chain with a cross, because he is a simple guy and doesn't like anything flashy. What a guy.
My ankle is starting to feel like we have hit the jackpot, I can tell because even though I have been through hell and still have a cast on, I can sorta kinda put a little bit of weight on it to stand up and take a piss now and not be in crippling agony, and pain has been my guide this whole time. To be able to stand is such a relief and I know within myself that this is a sign of healing. The fusion must have been a success.
I can't wait to get the fucking cast of though and that day comes around pretty quick.
Ever had a cast cut off with a small angle grinder? I had never broken a bone before now so I had never experienced it. It's a small saw with a guide that stops the blade going too deep and touching the skin but nonetheless it's a super weird experience as the nurse cuts the friggen thing away. Check it out:
I wasn't really ready to see my leg looking so pathetic if I'm honest. It has seriously deteriorated into a basic bone format. It is so skinny, there is no muscle left, and it's quite sad to notice it in this way.
You know how when you don't see something for a while and then you do again you can see the differences from since the last time? I don't know if that makes a good sentence but let me give another example to illustrate.
It was over 20 years ago when I moved to Melbourne and left my elderly parents in South Australia, not that far away, an 8 hour drive or a 1hr flight, but between being a busy corporate high flying snob with tickets on himself, getting into a relationship with Scotty and thinking I was almighty and so self important, there was this period before FaceTime when I didn't see my folks, my Mum in particular, for a good two years.
And then I flew home and I saw her. And she had aged dramatically before my eyes in those two years and it was a physical shock that I could barely disguise standing in front of her.
Her hair had gone completely white and she looked more wrinkled than I remember, he skin had lost much of it's elasticity and her eyes looked less bright than I remembered, and her teeth had deteriorated. All the things that happen to all of us with age, especially a super hard working woman who has migrated across the continent, had five children, worked her body into the ground and then dedicated her remainding years to the husband she married fifty years prior.
It took me a while to comprehend and even now it makes me feel quite sad thinking about it. I had missed all of that. I had taken it for granted and missed spending that time with her, with them, missed supporting them, missed hearing the stupid stories over and over. Missed sitting with her watching whatever she wanted on the TV or listening to Dad's craziest latest invention to keep consistent water termprature in the shower or who was in power and how shit politicians are. And now they are gone.
Maybe that explains my previous point better? My leg had been in a cast for six weeks, two of them I had to keep it elevated for 23 out of 24 hours of every day and the rest of them I didn't physically see it because of the cast. So when it came off I hadn't seen it for a full six weeks and it had detiorated significantly from how I remember it.
The two main toes on my left leg looked even more clawed than before, the bones looked more lumpy and of course, now my ankle is fused it doesn't move at all. There no flex at all. It's just a solid ... thing.
It feels super detached from the rest of my body like it doesn't belong to me. I have feeling, but it is different now. The sole of my foot is pretty numb, I can move my two main toes but the three little ones feel really powerless. They move when I try but not like the control I have over the monkey toes on my right foot. I can pick things up off the ground with those bad boys. The left foot feels like it belongs to somebody else. That is super weird.
Dr DS is super happy with his work but he points out the gaps between bones and fractures tunning through tibia fibia that niw need to close up to make a successful fusion. I don't really know what it's meant to look like but I can see the gaps...
But it doesn't hurt like it used to! Huzzah!
So I'm given heaps of painkillers and sent home and told to take it easy. Try weight bearing in six weeks, but really slowly, take it easy. Use pain as your guide.
And that's the first time I remember evaporating.
I'm euphoric after that consult and mostly pain free, but am told to take the painkillers anyway as you can't heal when in pain. So I go home and I'm chilling on the couch with Bonnie, Scotty has some stuff to do at his yard on the trucks of whatever and I'm just gonna kick back and play some good music and see how this leg feels.
I check out my scripts and see I have some new Oxycodone that are slow release, but 20MG and that seems new to me but it says take two, so I do. Now at this point I have been really pushing back on this stuff, have cut the THC oil out almost completely and have been getting by on just Paracetamol so I should've really thought about that kind of dose when I wasn't in serious pain like I was used to.
But I didn't. Down the gob they go. That's 40MG of slow release oxy at once and I'm not really in pain...soooo....
I think I was listening to a Matt Corby, or maybe it was Ry X, or someone chilled out as I was planning on nothing, going nowhere, maybe catch a few zzzs.... when all the drugs seemed to kick in at once and I couldn't physically move. I wasn't paralysed and it wasn't unpleasant but I couldn't really ... move.
That's when I noticed the beautiful sparkles of blue and purple rising up from my body like mist. It was like I had started glittering?
Like a bad Photoshop job or a filter on a Snapchat or some shit I was turning into Pixie Dust.
It was fucking out of this world! I was super sure I was just going to completely disapparate into the universe like a bad Harry Potter spell, glittering out into a blissful puff of shiny blue and purple sparkles like a Unicorn piñata that just got fucking clobbered with a baseball bat. I was evaporating! Won't lie, it was pretty outstanding.
I just lay there shimmering for a while, not really knowing how long or what was actually happening and then probably semi lost consciousness. I woke up a few hours later, groggy but happy enough. The music hadn't changed, Bonnie was still there looking at me with big brown eyes of suspicion or worry I can't be sure, and I hadn't evaporated. I had just had way too much oxy.
That's, I asssume, how or why people get fully addicted to the shit searching for that evaporating feeling. But it's not for me and I take note of the dosage from that day forward making sure not to go there again. It's not like I don't like evaporating but I do like being in some sort of control of what is happening to me and that was out of body level shit that was too close to drug fuckery for my liking.
It's now early December and the weeks are passing quicker, approaching Christmas again, not much to really speak of. Not too much pain and nothing really notable in my trauma diary to speak of for a change. I start to pull my shit together and think about getting back into the gym or exercising and getting my act together as a human being now that the pain is more managed than it has been for a very long period, over a year to be exact.
Christmas comes and goes, New Year passes again and now it is 2022 and I am turning 50 this year. Fucking hell. How did that happen? I was only 48 when this happened? Surely it has to end soon I muse to myself. Counting days until the next review is mostly what I think about, searching out and end to this nightmare and wanting to hear good news and that things have indeed turned around.
Stupidly somewhere along the way after that last surgery or since the cast came off I picked up the ciggies again. It had been on and off for a long while and depression played into it along with the serious lack of anything to do I'd nick outside onto the deck and smoke a fag to kick the boredom. But it has escalated again now into a full time habit. Sleeping rough I'll wake up a 2am and go outside smoke two or three darts, drink a Red Bull ffs, and then crawl or hop on crutches meekly back into bed and try sleeping which never really comes.
It's the end of January now and I'm starting to weightbear on my left leg.
It's a fucking miracle! I've got a moonboot and it helps support the leg and stay in position for healing, but also provides cushioning and a bit of support that I just can't get any other way. At first I hate the moonboot but slowly I get to grips with it a bit and find it is a support tool and I can develop a sort of walk on it, at first with two crutches, then slowly over weeks, one crutch, and eventually without a crutch.
It's a revelation in my recovery. Having been off my leg for well over a year, to be able to sort of walk again is almost tear jerking.
We go to see Dr DS again early Feb and he is well pleased with progress and is happy for me to start transitioning into a Rocker Shoe. These are special kinds of shoes that are really stiff and have a sole that is like a banana which will help with my gait because the ankle is fused it mimics the naturally rock of your ankle and I'm starting to think this really could be a good thing, it's really happening. I'm going to recover, I'm going to walk again. I can do it.
These little bits of info and encouragement lift my mood leaps and bounds. I'm starting to pull out of the darkness and back into the light, I even speak with my shrink and start to transition off of some of the anti depression meds I've been taking for the past year. He recommends taking it slow and going down incrementally from 25mg to 20mg, from there to 15mg and try to notice if any of the bad stuff, moods and thoughts of running away creep back in, these are signs of the depression coming back and we will check back in, in another six months. I am feeling so much better than I was!
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