Xray excitement and food fun

Posted in: Injury Time

A highlight of today was mildly starving myself in anticipation of Claire bringing Ben's Cookies! Woohoo! Thank you very much Claire! Big thanks too to Pei who brought yellow flowers, M&S mini-cookies, and the interesting observation that hospitals don't have much yellow, and a reminder how good we in the UK have it with hospitals compared to say Malaysia.

So a bunch of us saw the xrays and CT scans today - us included a vet friend and a nurse friend. I'd only seen the post-op ones that look an awful lot like these (thanks Claire for the link). I think I had a quite good idea of what the damage was but it's always interesting seeing what it physically looks like. The left heel literally had fragments of the calcaneus bone (big lumpy one which constitutes the heel) floating about it. The right foot looks really well repaired; the damage is localised to just the calcaneus, and thus the subtalar joint it forms with the talus bone above it. This is quite a low mobility joint so at worst shouldn't affect me too much (*cross fingers*). Essentially: all good news for my right foot. The left foot is still an open question - have to wait for more ossification (bone formation) and see what develops. I'm awaiting a chat with Mr Klinker the surgeon who repaired my right foot to discuss things like whether it should be in a cast, repair time, more surgery, etc.

The CT scans are amazing, photographic series of slices with incredibly high detail. You have to mentally reconstruct these slices into a 3D shape but even so exactly where the fractures and so on are are minutely reported. Awesome - this technology is definitely a fantastic aspect of Western medicine.

Posted by Paul Makepeace at June 3, 2005 21:43 | TrackBack