The Answer

Back from Rockyview, armed with a final answer as to how many screws there are in the six million dollar ankle, after the cock-up with my request I made to them the other week. Way back when I was in hospital, and my boss and a labmate came to visit after the operation, they were told "five one side, two the other". Or at least that's my recollection. This tallied with - to be blunt - the ones I can feel when I rub my fingers up and down where the scars are on my ankle/shin. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the actual images recorded which meant having to make the trip down there one last time to collect them. Although it was worth it as getting every last image is good, since I can now see where exactly each bone broke and how long it took to heal. And I get the answer I've been waiting seven months to find out. And as I've said before, these are useful things to have when travelling through airports and metal detectors and so on.

Remembering that we're looking front on (the outside of my leg is on the right, the inside on the left), the image on the upper right is from September. That's not "five plus two", is it? I see why it elicited a "wow, that's a lot of stuff in there" from the radiographer the last time. So there is no way in the world I don't set off airport metal detectors now. None at all.

I put the other CD in to try and decide whether the immediately-post-break X-ray was fit for public viewing, and it looks like they haven't included it. Boo-urns. So you'll never get to see what it looked like; only the teammates present got that dubious prvilege. Viewing the various CT scans that I had taken at nearly 3am that were included is pretty cool though. Here's a negative of the post-surgery X-ray, showing where the breaks were, marked by the yellow lines. It's much more obvious on this one than the ones above and below. The tibia is on the left, fibula on the right. Given that I rolled my ankle as I did this, my foot was essentially dislocated to the left as you look, to an angle of 30+ degrees. In so doing, the heelbone moving caused the end of the tibia and fibula to break as shown. In addition to all the X-rays, I also now have a full set of the various radiographer's notes. The first one was written at 10:10pm on the night I did it, and it's pretty funny after the fact. Next to "Reason for exam" is simply written "trauma". That's one word for it, I suppose. It's also just as well, I suppose, that I chose to go under general anaesthetic rather than just from the waist down. Can you imagine being fully conscious while all this is going in?

So one last one: the X-ray from June 6th, short of three weeks from the operation, on the day when I went back for the bright red cast. This X-ray is obscured slightly because I still have the post-surgery cast on. That's the return on the X-ray outside of my actual leg. If you look closely, you can see that the breaks haven't healed at that point in time. The columns of little horizontal marks are, of course, the staples holding the incisions from surgery closed, which were removed about an hour later which was something less than fun.

The epilogue to the story: The football team I play in are currently in the process of ordering jerseys for the upcoming season(s). To save on the cost of having new shirts printed every time a new member joins, we have gone for Muppet names on the back, as well as numbers, so that shirts can be passed on from one person to another. Being of the traditionalist sort, I had plumped for number 1 (and Bunsen as my Muppet, which is highly appropriate), as every team should for a goalie. But I can't help but think I should now change it to number 13, one for each screw, as is common for the second goalie in pretty much every football team in England. It's apparently almost totally shunned as a number for hockey over here due to superstition. But I really can't be that much more unlucky. Can I?