4 Years in Vignettes

Hi. Apologies for, once again, taking forever to post here.

To be totally blunt, I knew I wanted to talk about my experiences with reconstructive surgery, but I didn’t know how I wanted to talk about it. My initial drafts of this post were incredibly dark and bitter in a way that wasn’t constructive. They also felt strangely pandering; even though I don’t have a patreon or any other way people for people to donate money to me, it still felt like I was just slinging trauma and farming pity.

I still wanted to convey parts of the experience, though; particularly the parts that were hard to describe, because it felt like keeping those to myself was criminal. We writers thrive on conveying emotions and experiences, so it just feels wrong to deny everyone a chance to expand their palates.

Still, I knew I couldn’t trust myself to be direct and hyper-emotional, so I decided to express myself in the healthiest way I could: creative writing.

What I have for you today is a series of vignettes in chronological order. I took time to try to make them as honest as I could. I hope you enjoy.

Post-Op

All you can do is try to sleep.

But by 2AM, you begin to understand that you live by their pulse. The beat of the balloon inflating, shoving your foot, deflating. The random swell of laughter from the TV–a cycle of flashing nightmares thanks to the hydromorphone–roaring you awake and then rumbling down to whispers you can barely hear.

There’s also the growing pulse of your nerves, tightening as the drugs thin. You only notice them in passing; at best, the painkillers only make it slightly easier to forget that your leg is throbbing, swollen–broken into pieces that are bolted together–but only for an hour or so. Then the pain gets hotter–worse. Or maybe just as bad as it was before? At this point, days after surgery, it’s still impossible to tell.

Your roommate says, “Hello?” as he answers his phone. He laughs; someone he was just talking to earlier has called him back. “I know!” he chuckles and starts talking like it’s not a problem for anyone. It’s 3AM.

Somehow, this is still better than your last roommate. You’re in a hospital in the Bronx, so the last guy you were stuck with argued with the nurses–threatened them as they tried to help him. He even had a friend put something in the Chinese food they brought over–“In the rice, bro! Put it in the rice! These idiots won’t know!”

By 8AM, you’re still awake and the ward is loud with motion–a new cycle of life starting. Your new nurse walks in and writes their name on the whiteboard quietly, but when they see you’re awake, they aren’t surprised.

“How are you?” they ask.

I was so sure I’d die in surgery.

I woke up on the operating table at one point because I was choking on my own spit.

The anesthesia wasn’t strong enough, so I heard them cracking one of my bones. 

That or someone taking a chisel to pottery. Or it was a nightmare. I can’t tell.

I’m terrified I’ll never get better.

“I’m in pain,” I say.

“Okay,” they answer and then disappear. There’s a chance they won’t come back–that you’ll just be alone again for hours until the next nurse shows up–but there’s nothing you can do about that. You say, “Okay,” and settle the muscles you used to lift your head.

You’re going to be back in your corner of the room for another eight hours, listening to life cycle by again. 

And all you can do is try to sleep.

The Kick

Apparently, it happens because your body is trying to shake something off. A reflex, like when you jump awake while dozing. Your body thinks that the pins drilled into your bones, locked in a brace that’s suspending your leg, are something it can just bat away, so it tries to.

Repeatedly. To be clear, your body doesn’t just give up after one attempt; it tries, and then, when you’re falling asleep again, it tries again–harder. When it finally does stop, it just tries again the next night.

It gets to the point that the prospect of falling asleep is terrifying. Most days, even when you get tired, you stay awake until 5AM, 6AM, waiting until you’re so exhausted that you just pass out.

Because the alternative is your leg kicking so hard that you feel your kneecap, which is still healing from a dislocation, dislocate again. You have woken up screaming at the top of your lungs so many times that you feel bad for your mother, running in from her room to check on you but unable to do anything to help. You just lie there and cry because you inflamed the swollen flesh around your pins and popped your knee out of place, but somehow it isn’t even your fault. You tell her you’re sorry anyway. That it’s okay and not to worry–that she can go back to sleep, but you know she won’t be able to. Poor, sweet old lady who deserves better than this.

At some point–you aren’t sure how long because you’re too tired to gauge these things anymore–you start to be unsure if the dislocations are real. You’ve told your doctor and he isn’t sure either. Your knee still seems to be getting better, so it could have just been a combination of the reflex and a nightmare. The trauma of feeling your knee separate for no reason–and the fear that it’ll happen again–mixed with the worst tick you can possibly imagine.

All you can feel when the kicking finally stops is bitter release. One problem you can tick off a list with countless items.

But it’s still something.

The Pin

“There’s a… flicking.” You’re a socially-challenged writer so trying to describe this in real-time is a nightmare.

“You mean the fixator is loose?”

“No.” If the fixator was loose, the pressure would’ve shattered your leg in countless places. A car crash in microcosm, starting on the inside of your tibia. “This pin, right here,” you say, pointing to one of the small ones. “I don’t know why, but now, when I walk, it flicks against something inside.”

You can tell your therapist’s assistant doesn’t get it–a very common occurrence when you try to explain anything about your condition, the surgeries, or your recovery. Almost no one has experienced it, very likely no one alive has experienced it exactly like you have, so you can’t expect him to understand.

But at the same time, you really want him to. “It’s like a piece of muscle or tendon gets caught between the pin and my tibia, and when I move it like this, the pressure builds until something flicks back into place.”

“Oh wow.”

Yes. Wow. 

Don’t be impatient. The average person never gets stabbed, and even if they do, the knife never stays in long enough for them to be like, “Huh! It shifted yesterday because I sneezed real hard and I’ve felt it against my spleen ever since! Weird!”

“Yeah, it blows,” you say instead, so casually that he laughs. “I don’t think I can do more of this exercise today.”

“No problem, bro. I get it. Can your doctor do anything about that?”

“Yeah. I might ask him to take it out.”

The therapist’s assistant winces. “Ouch.”

Despite everything, you laugh. “Yeah. It’s gonna be a time.”

A Quick Pull

Your doctor lights up when you say yes.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” you say, extremely grateful the flicking pin can be removed right now, without surgery. The sooner it’s out, the better.

But also, you see an opportunity here. “Can I record it?”

He laughs and says, “Sure!” like you knew he would.

Somehow, it’s not terrifying when he comes back with another doctor. Not terrifying until after they’ve unbolted the pin from the fixator–the point when the second doctor tries to cut the pin with a wire cutter. The idea of it snapping puts you on edge–you’ll feel it through your tibia and that’s never fun–so you’re grateful when the pin survives without a scratch, the wire cutter instantly chipped.

“Eh. We’ll just pull it out.”

They cover the end of it with brown antiseptic, really making sure they cover every inch, the occasional nudge yielding such deep, marrow-pain that you feel it in your teeth. Your doctor holds your leg while the other braces–left hand on the fixator, right holding the pin with a medical wrench.

He takes a moment to test it, turning it, wiggling it to make sure it’s going to come loose at all. It feels like a shallow tug through your insides because that’s exactly what it is–not pain exactly, but smooth motion where it just shouldn’t be. You want to shout, “Don’t do that!” but he has to and it’s fine.

So, instead, you take a breath because the room has gone quiet. The doctor pulls as hard as he can–the sudden motion of a bandage being ripped off, but now with impossibly high stakes: the chance that he pulls and something catches–a nick from the attempted cut shredding on the way out, getting caught on something.

But there’s only a clean, smooth rush of pressure being released. The cracking of a nick in your back. The release of a warm massage, only it’s cold, tiny, smooth, reversed–pulled out instead of worked in.

You manage to only say, “Phew,” and then laugh. Everyone laughs with you. They bandage you up, and when you move your leg, it’s like a dream–no more flicking, no more worries about the entry and exit points of the pin getting infected. Your day is immediately better, your daily cleaning rituals simpler, your life improved dramatically–even though there are still seven pins in your leg. Item 83 of that list officially crossed off.

When you bring the video to your physical therapy place, everyone watches. A fun hour of reactions to something crazy.

And as you do exercises, you’re grateful the pin isn’t there to make every moment hell. 

Outside

It’s like waking up in a foreign country.

Because it wasn’t just reconstructive surgery–it was reconstructive surgery on the heels of lockdown. Right when everyone else was starting to go back to normal, this happened with your leg. You missed several weddings for your closest friends–probably the clearest bad result of all of this.

But the least clear hits you while you’re sitting at a bus stop in Bay Plaza. You’re looking at nearby stores and realizing almost all of them are different now–unfamiliar, like you woke up in an alternate reality. The Kmart is an At Home now, and what the fuck even is At Home? You aren’t a Kmart stan or something, but you’ve never even heard of At Home, so it makes the derealization worse.

A strange way to realize you’re a man out of time. You knew the world was moving on without you, because of course it was, but now it’s surreal. It’s been four years. One year of not being able to go outside and three of not being able to walk. People lost jobs in that time–then started over fresh. Moved. Got married. Had kids. While you were stuck inside, forcing your muscles to relearn what they’d forgotten.

Maybe that’s why you’re thinking of all of this–because today was the first day when you took a step with your leg, outside, and thought, Right. Okay–that’s it.

Yes, I remember now. That’s how the old gait felt.

That’s how I used to walk.

It’s more of a kick forward than you think. Not a swing and catch-the-floor with your foot. Not a slide and step forward onto your toes. It’s a kick forward using the exact muscles you’re afraid to use. Then step down onto the heel, then the toe, muscles holding as you swing the other foot forward. Then, you don’t turn your leg to the side–you don’t need to do that anymore to get it free of the floor–you just bend your knee straight forward and pull with those muscles again, and swing your leg forward again.

There was a quiet relief to realizing all of this–finding that stride again. You still had to start using your cane a few minutes after finding it, but it was the first time you felt like you could just walk–that you could just go wherever you wanted to today. Or even tomorrow. It’s incredibly exciting. You undersell it to yourself because you don’t want to jinx it, and there are still so many items on your list of problems. But it’s very nice to casually think, “Maybe I’ll go to _______ tomorrow,” while knowing you can.

You just have to accept the lost-time part. It sucks–it will always suck–but just focus on things getting better. On finding your stride again.

And focus on what you want to do now that you’re in your 40’s–the real mindfuck of your personal time dilation. You were in your 30’s when this started, but now… No. Don’t think about it. Focus on the stories you want to tell instead. The places you want to see. The people you want to be with. Because you’re fortunate enough to be able to do that now.

And that’s something.

~

Well. That was about as open as I could be in as positive of a light as I could cast. Apologies if it’s still a little too dark. And also apologies if it’s a bit too vague. As always, there’s a lot I wasn’t willing to share.

That said, thank you for reading a snippet of what I went through. If you’ve experienced something like it, goddamn, was that not the absolute worst? And if you’ve never experienced something like it, I hope this post gave you useful perspective, especially for writing.

If you’d like to check out some of my fiction…

“Aixa the Hexcaster” was published at Mirror Dance Fantasy in 2016: http://www.mirrordancefantasy.com/2016/09/aixa-hexcaster.html

“A Facet of That Faceless Death” was performed on the NoSleep Podcast earlier this year (be advised, my story is one of the two on the paywalled, members-only section of the episode; to hear it, you would have to get a $5 membership to NoSleep): https://www.thenosleeppodcast.com/episodes/s21/21×11

Until next time, take care, and remember: if you ever see someone with an external fixator on any part of their body, yes they can use whatever quick, samaritan-style help you’re willing to provide.