Thursday, June 7, 2012

Post 33rd Surgery Plus Mystery Foot Pain

Surgery #33 is checked off my to-do list, a to-do list that I unwillingly made for myself.  And it went really well.  The surgery itself was only about an hour - the shortest surgery I've ever put on my "surgery-do" list. Then another hour in the recovery room before heading over to the OBC, dad in tow.

When I got back to the OBC I was met with warm greetings of love and welcome back from everyone I passed, which brought little pieces of uplifting joy to my heart with each one.  And that's not feelings of joy to be back in the hospital exactly but rather more that I felt and could see on each person's face that I had made an impact on their lives in some way when I came in that dreadful night and everyday that I've come back.  We go all the way to the end of the hall to they very last room.  A room, oddly enough, that I have never been assigned to in all my four years of staying here after every surgery.

But something else has got my attention and is causing me pain.  It's not my surgical site like you'd think it would be moments after surgery.  No, it's my foot...the bottom of my foot, the bottom of the heel of my foot.  It's just my right foot and it's been plaguing me with terrible pain since early Monday morning when I woke up. Now this has happened to me before off and on for years but never like this, never this bad.  In the past I would wake up to pain in the bottom of my heel as well as up the underneath, right side of my foot but I would massage it and walk around on it and it would eventually go away within 30-60min.  Never did it last any longer.  Now THAT sounds like plantar fasciitis.  After waking up a little bit more after surgery, the pain really started in and only got worse as the day went on and night settled in.  Sleep?  yeah, right.  I was getting extremely heavy doses of pain medication in my IV and the first time I got it, oh boy howdy, RELIEF.  And the pain subsided for close to three hours after which I got more and I started to notice that with each new shot into my IV, the relief became shorter and shorter.  Great.  I broke down crying several times Monday after the pain got worse.  And I can take a lot of pain.  I've been through some of the worst pain but this was such pain that I compared it to pain I felt when I first woke up from my burn injury.  Yeah, THAT bad.

Finally a foot doctor from across the street came to see me on Tuesday morning and take a look at my foot. After taking a look and feeling around his assessment was as follows:  Could be one of two things: 1) plantar fasciitis BUT it's not behaving like typical plantar fasciitis because it is causing excruciating pain just laying in bed so there could be a nerve tangled up in there and 2) a bone fracture which is what it is behaving more like.  So he ordered an x-ray and I did that Tuesday evening.  Most of Tuesday and Tuesday evening I'm crying cause the pain is so intense and unrelenting.  But Wednesday morning rolls around and the foot doctor comes back in and announces that from the x-ray it looks like I have a bone fracture in my heel but he wants to do a CT scan to get a better look and confirm.  If it is confirmed to be a bone fracture I will be put in a splinted boot and ordered to stay off it for 6 weeks so it can heal.  It's around lunchtime that I get transported down to radiology to get the CT scan done.  After I get back, it's time for my dad to head back home to La Grande so I have to say goodbye and it's upsetting cause I hate being left alone at the hospital.

Later that afternoon, the nurse informs me that they got the results back from the CT scan and it showed no fracture.  So there was a sense of relief but at the same time a feeling of some kind of disappointment because we were back to square one with not really knowing what to diagnose it as.  Another break down sparked by killer pain and my nurse, God bless her, gets me a cold wash cloth and wipes away my tears, tells me to breathe, holds my hand and talks to me.  I finally settle down but I'm still in pain.  And I'm still in pain as I write this and it's Thursday morning.

My surgical sites on the sides of my neck look really good and actually feel pretty good aside from the tenderness and any pain.  I feel a lot looser and have more mobility.  When my doctor came in to check on my neck he asked how it was feeling and I told him what I just told you but I also told him there's a spot that still feels a little tight on the right side of my neck and he took a look and said he would release it some more in that area.  Also next Monday on my next surgery he is going to do some z-plasty's around the corners of my mouth in an attempt to loosen up the skin around my mouth cause it's so tight and contracted.  The contracture releases on the sides of my neck are pretty serious.  Pretty deep and wide.  But so far they feel so much better and don't pull on my face and head like they used to so I am happy for that.  I just can't believe I'm having to deal with this foot shit on top of my surgery.

 (Right side release)

(Left side release)