Good evening friends! Just throwing out a little update here. It's now been two weeks to the day that I had my accident(s) and I've got both good and bad-ish news. We'll get the bad out of the way first. After dealing with all of the paperwork, red tape, phone calls, etc., I finally got my surgery scheduled. Unfortunately, it won't be until June 13th (!) That means I'll be hobbling around on crutches for three+ more weeks. I'm kind of shocked it's gonna take that long and that I'm expected to somehow function with a broken foot in the meantime. The nature of my injury has left me unable to wrap or bandage my foot, tape my toe or wear a normal shoe or sock, which means I have to be very, very careful not to fall (especially since I've been hopping around my apartment a lot), hit or put any pressure on my foot.
I can definitely now feel that my fractured toe is currently just kind of hanging there, and it's alternately sore and numb; almost like it's fallen asleep at times but at other times sending random sharp pains my way, especially when I'm sitting upright for too long. It's not as bad when I'm lying down with it propped up, but it's definitely uncomfortable at all times. The big delay in the surgery is mostly because of how it was all arranged through worker's comp. They assigned me two doctors (I didn't get to choose here); one to handle the surgery and another to mostly handle the paperwork stuff. As luck would have it, they BOTH have two-week-long vacations scheduled smack in the middle of this. If I attempted to switch at this point we'd have to start over from scratch with all of the paperwork and doctor's visits and it would take even longer to get this surgery booked, so I'm basically stuck in this situation for the duration.
The absolute worst part for me is that I've had almost no "professional" help with any of this. The first doctor I saw didn't even look at my injury and the surgeon who will be operating on me looked at it for about 10 seconds and left the room. Neither of them said more than five words to me and were both short and dismissive like I was wasting their time, which I've heard is pretty common when dealing with doctors who are handling worker's comp cases. I don't know if they have some kind of monetary incentive to half-ass it or what, but previous doctors I've had never treated me this way. Trust me, I wish I could have just used my OWN insurance, even with the deductible. At least then I'd probably already have had the surgery by now.
So I've been given zero advice on what to do, bad signs to look for or how to handle or care for my injury as I wait. Meaning, I feel like I'm pretty much on my own here. It's especially strange there's nothing resembling a follow-up visit to, ya know, make sure there's no infection or that my foot's not gonna rot off or something. I did do some reading and watched some Youtube videos for what it's worth. Most of the material about workplace injuries involves lawsuits, how frequently people get fired after an injury on the job (jury's still out on this one, I guess) and medical malpractice suits, including one nice story about a woman who sued because she ended up having to have half her foot removed due to a long delay for a broken foot surgery. All these stories really did was make me paranoid.
So now that that's out of the way, some good news... I am seeing a slow improvement. Sure my foot still looks like literal purple hell, and doesn't feel great, but the swelling has gone down some and the pain is not unbearable even without my 800mg ibus. It's getting close to the point where I should be able to sit upright long enough to get some writing done here. In fact, I'm going to try to tomorrow. This may be a great time to actually finish up some of those country lists I have mostly finished but haven't posted yet. Also good news about that car wreck I had. No concussion from hitting my head on the steering wheel and my Elephant Man levels of swell are mostly gone. Also, the insurance company has decided they're going to fix my vehicle instead of totaling it out. All of the damage was cosmetic. Whew! Not having to try to work in car shopping after my surgery is a huge relief and one less thing I have to worry about.
Perhaps the best thing of all is that once I put this whole experience behind me, I'm going to have an all new appreciation for the simple things in life. These include standing, walking, driving, being able to choose my own healthcare providers, wearing shoes and real socks instead of an uncomfortable plastic Velcro boot, being able to sleep on my side instead of flat on my back with my leg propped up, being able to sleep on my side instead of flat on my back with my leg propped up while wearing an uncomfortable plastic Velcro boot, eating things other than microwave meals and pizza, taking actual showers instead of sitting on the edge of the tub with a washcloth trying not to get water everywhere and, of course, everything I do right here. I do not miss vacuuming though.
