Sorry for so long without a post. A lot has happened to my ankle since after the surgery.

Pretty much the next day after my last post, my mother drove down to West Virginia to pick me up. Since my job had housing included and I wasn’t working any more, I was homeless. The housing was inside a DNR station which was the real issue. I’m sure if it had just been a house they were renting, it wouldn’t have been too big of a deal for my staying there but who know.

This left me to spend the next unknown amount of time on my sister’s couch. YAY! You are all jealous, I can tell. Don’t lie. Anyways, I spend the next two weeks at my sister’s house until the follow up appointment. Back to West Virginia. This time, I get to trade in my splint for a fiberglass cast. The only time I get to downgrade the size. I don’t know what is was about those splints, but everytime they put one on, they just got bigger and bigger.

After they took the splint off my leg was still blue! I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but it is from whatever they use to clean the area for surgery. The incision that they made was huge! There are only 2 screws in there, and they only had to go in from the one side, was it really neccessary to cut me that far?

Got another x-ray. Results show two drywall screws holding my ankle together. Pretty mean looking, but seriously, they look like three inch drywall screws. Then they proceed to say a bunch of things real fast like, “don’t worry if they break, sometimes that happens, we’ll take the half out we can get” and “we’ll only take the screws out if we have too, if they irritate your skin” and “we’ll see you in four weeks.” I’m still back on “don’t worry if they break”… what do you mean don’t worry if they break? Why are they in there if they are going to break?

After getting back to my sister’s house for another four weeks of sitting on a couch, I immediately went to work getting stickers for my cast. Moosejaw and Superfeet were both gracious enough to give me stickers! I also threw a Rosetta Stone sticker on the side for good measure. Some of the stickers stayed on just fine, but others, I helped stay on with some Gorilla Glue.

Time passed and we get to go back to West Virginia. Five hundred miles each way and a hotel stay is starting to get old. This time we brought my niece and made a weekend out of it. We camped at Blackwater Falls State Park. It was pretty nice. Katie joined us since it was her birthday and she was able to get the weekend off. On Saturday I got to crutching down 214 stairs to check out the falls, and then back up. I got bored and in the middle of the way back up and did a little bouldering (and got yelled at for it). Right after that we signed up for an Irish Road Bowling tournament and completed an 1.5 miles course. By the end of the day, I was getting tired in the 85 degree heat.

Finally on Monday, I get to have my cast off. I knew I had lost some muscle mass because I could stick most of my hand into my cast, but man, I wasn’t really expecting it to shrink that much. Gross. I don’t have any good after pictures, or of any of my crappy walking boot thing I have to wear now yet, but hopefully I’ll have some soon to share.

I am allowed to add 25% of my body weight each week, and right now I’m at 50%. It is tough to gauge, and I think I’m a little behind but my next appointment isn’t for 6 weeks (Aug 2) so I have time to ease into it. Hopefully I won’t need any physical training and I can do it myself because the doctor mentioned that I might have a tough time finding someone out of state to take the workers comp from West Virginia. Apparently they are known for skipping out of paying out of state. Great. I’d rather not have to anyways. I kinda need to start working again as soon as I can since it doesn’t look like I’ll be in a grad program in the fall.

Well that is my update for now. Hope you enjoyed it. I’ll leave you with a picture of my cast being taken off.

Dan Graham
The Dirty Tree Hugger