Look Ma No Cane

I don't want to make this blog one long medical report after another but I've had a very medically intense year.

I work for the University of Chicago Press in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. I ride the South Shore commuter train from the Chesterton/Dune Park station to the 57th Street station in Chicago. From the train station, I have a 10 minute walk to my office in the Press building on 60th Street.

On March 3rd of this year, I was on my way to work and had just gotten off the train. I was crossing 57th Street when I slipped on some ice and fell, hard, to the ground. I knew instantly that I had broken my left leg. If I attempted to move, the pain in my leg was excruciating. Fortunately, some passersby stopped to help and called 911. A short time later I was in an ambulance on my way to the University of Chicago ER. Indeed, my left leg was broken just a little below the ball end at the top of the femur. I later learned that the doctors considered this a broken hip.

The doctors in the ER informed me that I would need surgery to insert a rod to repair the break. Fortunately, since my experience last year, I had made and Advanced Medical Directive that gave Chuck the right to make decisions on my behalf if I was unable to do so. I called my friend Cindy at work and asked her to come to the hospital and bring a copy of the directive that I kept at the office. So once again I found myself in the situation of having to call Chuck to tell him not only that I was in the hospital but that I would also need surgery again. I told him not to come to the hospital (hospitals bring out the worst in him) but to wait until I knew more of what would happen. I also called my parents and let them know what was going on and asked them to tell my siblings.

The doctors decided that I would have surgery the following morning. Early the next morning, my broken hip was repaired. Chuck came to the hospital and I was able to see him after I was back in my room following the surgery. I was expecting a relatively short stay in the hospital but my body had other plans. After the surgery, I started spiking a high fever and my heart started beating rapidly. Despite many tests over several days and massive antibiotics, the doctors could not figure out why I was spiking the fevers. Finally, on Saturday, they decided that I needed a second surgery so they could clean out the wound from the first surgery. The second surgery would be on Sunday. After the second surgery, they told there was a hematoma in the leg, no surprise there, but they did not find any infection. The fevers continued after the second surgery and the doctors were at as much of a loss as before.

In addition to the surgeons, I was also seeing doctors from the medicine, infectious diseases, and rheumatology services. There were running just about every test known to man to try to figure out why I kept having fevers. I consented to an HIV test which came back negative. None of the tests pointed to a cause of the fevers. On Wednesday of my second week in the hospital, the surgeons decided, much to the dismay of the infectious disease doctors, to stop the antibiotics. Miraculously, this did the trick. The fevers stopped almost immediately and in 24 hours they told me I could go home the following day as long as I did not develop any fevers in the meantime. After 12 days in the hospital, I was finally allowed to go home.

Chuck, Emerson, and Ozzie were greatly relieved to have me back home. This time I came home with a walker; not convenient for moving about an apartment with two small young dogs. Emerson and Ozzie were sufficiently afraid of the walker to keep out of my way most of the time. The week after getting home from the hospital I began physical therapy. The therapist quickly gave me crutches and I was able to move around more easily. At the beginning of May, the surgeon said that there was enough new bone growth around the break so that I could start bearing weight on my leg and that I should move from the crutches to a cane. Just this past week my therapist suggested that I start walking without the cane at home. And yesterday, I ventured out without the cane for the first time. It was good to finally walk around unencumbered. I'm hoping that the next year will be much quieter for me medically than the past year has been.