[VAXman(Admin)]

Originally posted by Roger Lee
Uh, you see that metal thingie that's to the inside of that ankle? That thing happens to be FIRMLY ATTACHED by LONG METAL SCREWS to the BONES IN HIS FEET, ANKLE AND LEG!!!!!!!!!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeuuuughgggggghhhhhh*twitch * *scratch furiously*

Skeeve. Just ... Skeeve.

Roger -Dot- Lee, hoping y'all will excuse him while he goes off and has a professional, world class, top of the line case of the heebee jeebies.

...and that's only a single break!

In '78 I was hit by a car while riding on a motorcycle. I broke 34 bones in a single day (to quote from TLLDOB: Evel Knievel, you got nothing on me). My left leg was crushed into a 24 piece compound fracture. Many of the nerves and arteries and veins were severed. Many hours of neuro and vascular surgery took place before the leg was ever set. To this day I have limited sensation in the leg (made it really interesting to learn to walk again) and I get phantom sensations too... it feels like bugs crawling on your skin.

Anyway, back in those days they still used plaster. I had a full leg plaster cast for 2+ years. To hold the pieces of the leg in place, surgical steel rods were driven into each piece of the leg and held in place in the plaster of the full leg cast. The protruding bits of metal were covered with white rubber "test tube cork" like safety covers to keep me from injuring myself or others on the 1 inch "spikes".

The accident occurred 5 days after I graduated High School (en route to look for a summer job). I spent 2 months of the summer in traction in the hospital. I was released on my birthday in August. Believe it or not, I started college in the fall against my Dr.'s and parents wishes. Locomotion via crutches isn't much fun -- especially, on a college campus where there is typically much walking. I had to come home every weekend for X-rays to check that I wasn't injuring myself while away at college. That put a damper on weekend college parties for the first semester.

In that brief few weeks at home, I found time to paint my cast to cover up all of the graffiti my friends wrote on my plastered leg. Shaving mirrors and paint brushes extended with chopsticks and masking tape aided me in painting the cast. Here's pix of the cast about a year after the initial accident. Most of the metal spikes had been removed (I had to touch up the pix every time they did that). Only about a 1/2 dozen remained at this time. You can barely make out 2 around the knee and 2 at the ankle in the pix. http://www.tmesis.com/cast/

Showering every day was a real ritual. I had to cover the cast with a heavy plastic bag and tape the top to my leg with surgical tape.

If you want a case of the "heebee jeebies", come look at the compound fracture scars on my leg and see how straight it is... it looks like this:

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Physical therapy after the cast was removed was a joke. First session I was hoisted from a wheel chair into a seat in a pool. I was made to sit there for 15 mins and then they pulled me out and sent me home. I thought to myself that I'd never get on my feet that way and I never went back. Two of my friends at the time came over each day and picked me up by the arms and helped me as I attempted to walk. By the end of that last month of that summer, I had enough leg muscle to almost stand on my own without aid of a cane. I spent another year on a cane learning to figure out where my leg was spacially as I learned to walk again. The most difficult times being after a couple of drinks.