Healing

Healing is just about as bad as watching paint dry. I have been in my frames for almost 3 months now and I am still not healed!

I have been trying  my hardest to heal faster but it doesn't seem to work! I started out by going swimming. Yeah I did say swimming :p Metal is not the easiest thing to make float but I did it!

Everyday I attend physical therapy and am walking at my house all the time. So much work! Now that I am attending school, things seem to be better. Keeping my mind of the legs helps! The kids are extremely nice and helpful. I am going to the school I attended before I moved to Honduras, so I still know a lot of the kids.

PAIN

When I first talked to the doctor about the pain I would be in after surgery, he told me that I would have pain but as I progressed in healing the pain would subside. The first night after surgery I don't even remember so I don't really remember any pain as well for the few days in the hospital. Once I returned home the doctors wanted me to be walking and standing as much as possible. I am not sure why but to me every time I stand my brain tells me to stop! Something inside me says it is not right to walk on broken bones. The pain I have when I walk is unbearable, but to get better it must be done. My mom and I run into many conflicts about this because when I am at home and not at physical therapy all I want to do is lay down and rest. I know I have to walk to get better I just don't want to. As of today that will all be changing I am vowing to get up and walk every two hours. It may only be 35 steps but it is walking. I called the doctor one night and was talking to him about the pain that I did have and his reply to me was "You know there is going to be some pain" HA some pain! For some reason I get upset... Its like they only have to preform the surgery they don't have to live with these. They get to go home to their families and are able to walk and have no pain. I wish this could be easier, but I know nothing comes without a challenge. No pain No gain! What a true statement!

1st week After

My surgery lasted 10 hours and went really well. At first my legs had ace bandages covering them so I couldn't exactly see what I had. When they took off the wraps I had first sight at what I was going to have to live with for about 4 months. That was my first sign of being afraid. I had realized I had almost 10 pounds of metal on my legs. But I knew that I could not let it beat me. For the 1st week in the hospital I was very happy and tried to smile as much as I could. I met many wonderful people and was pretty happy besides the little pain I had. About 3 days after my surgery I had my epidural taken out of my back and their number one priority was to get me to start weight baring. I had wonderful physical therapists that had me standing right away. I knew there was tons of pain that I could not deal with but I left it as is. After 10 days of being in the hospital, I was finally relased to go home. That's when the reality set in. I got home and realized that my life was completely turned upside down. I could no longer walk on my own with out help and I was confined to a wheel chair for a few days. That was the 1st time I cried and really became unhappy with what I had done to myself. But little by little I started to deal with myself. I started physical therapy two days after I got home and had realized that within 12 days I went from being able to play back to back basketball games to being tired from walking 50feet.

Before surgery

My name is Chelsea. I am 15 years old and I have had for previous knee surguries in my life. As I was entering The summer of my sophomore year, I went to visit my orthopedic doctor for a check up and found out that I was going to have a surgery called a tibial osteotomy on both my legs. When I first heard it I seemed to be okay with it I wasn't worried. My doctor and his nurse assured me that the surgery was going to help. In the 1st week of my summer I found out that I was going to have a Taylor Spatial Frame on not only one of my legs but two. The doctor explained it to me in this way... The frame is a six strut configuration that combines rings,pins, and wires that are put in the bone after the bone is cut in half to straighten out my legs. When I first heard this was going to happen I didn't really know how to react. And at the age of 15 how do you react to something like that? It may be just me but the way they explained it seemed so much simpler then it seemed.