2nd Surgery
After six weeks I get an X-ray on my ankle, to me it looks fine but my Radiologist license expired a while back. At the office later, I seemed to walk fine but he was not happy as he looks at my gate and the X-rays. After much discussion and my apprehension he convinces us that for my foot to be right I need one more surgery. This time he is going to put a cast for six weeks after. I can’t think of anything that has me more excited than to go back again for round two.
So I checked in Monday morning with a Tuesday surgery date. The clinic seem more crowded than the last time for sure. I went into a room with three older men. I will have to tell you, I did not know a person could sleep 20 hours a day. I guess with nothing to do it might be easier. They could also snore 20 hours a day and a couple of them were the most creative at snoring that I had ever heard.
So next day I roll off to surgery to with pretty much the same set of characters, except for the anesthesiologist who was much younger and took a bit longer to stick me in the right spot in the spine for the spinal block. Fortunately, I only screamed and cried for Mommy a couple of times, just kidding, and she got my feet numb for the surgery. They always ask you if you want to sleep or stay awake during and I wonder why anyone would want to stay awake even though you don’t quite make it through the whole surgery asleep, or at least I don’t.
Of course just like last time the next 24 hours are about as boring as you could make them. Laying flat in bed about the best you can hope for is a couple of pillows and nothing. Again it seems other people can seep at the drop of a hat and for long periods. I only wish that was me. My entertainment is watching the monitor of the woman across from to see her heart rate and BP go up and down. I slept about five hours that night, not that bad given the situation, then slowly had to wait through the morning to be back to the room with the three other men.
We did have a TV in the room, though I have no idea how it worked. Once in the afternoon and once a night the TV would just suddenly come on. No one had the remote, so someone had programmed it at some point. It was tuned to the channel my mother-in-law watches. In the afternoon we got the local news and Serbian folk singing, which is what they have on that channel every day. In the evening it was the news, sexy music videos and talk shows, with some folk music thrown in. Fortunately, I would go to sleep around 11 even if it was still on.
The clinic being more crowded getting assistance was slower. My catheter tube became disconnected once and I sat on a bed of piss for almost an hour before getting the chance to clean up. Otherwise, it was pretty much like the last time. Without the internet I would have gone crazy. One night I waited again about an hour for a pain shot. I think they were doing the best they could hearing the crowd from the other rooms.
I left the clinic a week early with the agreement I would come back and get my bandages changed. I had a plaster cast that had been cut to they could treat the wounds on my ankles where they made the incisions then rewrapped. We have done that once so far since I left, I switched from the walker to a wheelchair as I just could not hop well enough to get around with the walker.
We are playing the waiting game for the full plaster cast and the four or five weeks of recovery before we see how well it went this time.
I will keep you updated with medical care in Serbia as something noteworthy occurs.