It has been a crazy last few days…so lets catch up a little.
After the ER adventure of Saturday night, we waited until Monday and then went to the Tria Orthopedic Urgent Care center in Maple Grove. Because I did a “Save My Spot” the wait was not too long, which was nice. Met with a great ortho doctor who really looked at the scans that Mercy took and said right away I think you need to see a foot specialist and he set up an appointment for Wednesday morning. We left there and then went to a medical supply store and bought a “transport chair”, which is simliar to a wheel chair but does not have the big wheels on the side. We just needed some form of transporting me from the living room/bedroom/bathroom and the computer chair was really pretty cumbersome. This transport chair works perfectly. I can hop from the couch into the chair and have a really smooth ride into the bathroom.
Wednesday morning was the appointment with the foot specialist/surgeon. First we were seen by his intern and he talked a lot about what was seen on the x-rays and the CT scan. Yes, there were 5 bones broken in the foot and a small one in the ankle. But the biggest concern was what I believe is a ligament/tendon between the bones of the big toe and next toe over. That is what would require surgery if needed. But both the intern and when the doctor came in called it a gray area in that surgery was not necessarily a must have. It looks like that area is healing the way they would want it to. If they did surgery it would be to put screws in to pull in the 2 areas together to help the healing but both docs felt that the healing was progressing as they would hope without surgery. They did say often when they see this type of injury they do not always jump right into doing surgery and the healing process does great on its own. The same was going for the other bones that were broken…they seem to be healing great and are in fantastic alignment.
So the plan right now is to wait 2 weeks and then go back in for x-rays and if things are still healing as they hoped just continue with non weight bearing for 4 more weeks. If things do not look good on the x-rays then it would be surgery and 6 weeks of non weight bearing. So we are risking having an additional 2 weeks of resting, but I really think this left leg has been through so much already if we can avoid surgery that would be best for all!! The doctors were more than comfortable with taking this route. We will go back in on May 1 and see what the x-rays reveal.
Also I did get a call from Shelby, Dr. Chen’s nurse last night. Dr. Chen is out of the office all week so Shelby wanted to update me. The needle biopsy in the pelvic area came back as unremarkable, although they did get a small sample since the bleeding started to take over and stop the procedure. Dr. Chen is doing additional research on all of this…does the sarcoma and lymph nodes have some correlation? Why does the lymph nodes show as grown and then reduce in size and then grown and active again. She is also having additional conversations with the pathologists involved to try to get some more clarity on all of this. It is just all pretty strange. Even so, Shelby again confirmed that it is slow growing and waiting to get some additional information is not harmful at all and they may just end up doing a round of the Rituxan depending on what Chen finds out. Shelby said that Chen plans to get back to me next week with the results of her additional research and the pathologists discussions.
So already waiting on the foot, what is one more waiting molecule for Chen’s determination!! 🙂
So maybe by May we will have some good definitive answers on all of this. Meanwhile I am sitting with my 6 bone breaks, putting no weight on that foot and just chill-laxing waiting for the full answers. Chill-laxing…yes that is what I am doing! 🙂
Can you believe MN is going back down to freezing this weekend? Guess it is a good thing we did not open up the Big Lake place and plan to stay there. Not sure when that will happen now…there are so many stairs there and stairs are my real challenge right now!!
Take care!
TTFN
Dandy Ventures 