Frankenfoot

First off, this is what my foot looked like from about Noon on Friday until late this morning. The bandage was ginormous and wrapped all the way up around my ankle. It left a lot to the imagination about what was actually going on under there... but I wasn't allowed to peek until I went back to the doctor this morning. Like Christmas... do not open until...

So this morning I went to see my surgeon, Dr. G. I found that I was more nervous about this appointment than I had been about the surgery. OK. Maybe not MORE... but at least as much. What if the scar was huge? What if the bandage stuck to the incision and it hurt when he took it off? What if, what if, what if? Luckily I didn't have to wait to long to see the doctor once I got there, so I didn't have time to work myself up too much. :-)

He unwrapped what seemed like miles of ace bandage, tape, and gauze and revealed... FRANKENFOOT!

The incision, as you can see, IS quite large. Lots of stitches inside and outside. Turns out he found more than he bargained for when he got in there. First off, the cyst was growing toward my toes instead of toward my ankle, as he had thought. Second, it was under a tendon and pushing up on a muscle, making the muscle bulge. And lastly, as an added extra bonus, he found a bone spur under all of it, which is what likely caused the cyst in the first place. Ding, ding... we have a winner! Lucky me!

So it's a little swollen, a little bruised, a little stained with the stuff they clean the area with before surgery. In short, a little gross.

And what of all the "ink" you might be asking. Well, in pre-op, I was told to write "yes" on the ankle of the foot I was having operated on. When the doctor came in to talk to me before surgery, he initialed the top of my foot to confirm my choice of feet. I guess this is a CYA measure to ensure the doctor doesn't slice into the wrong foot. That would be bad. The smiley face... well, that was Dr. G making fun of me. He laughed at me when I took my Blackberry out to take a picture of my foot before he re-bandaged it. So he added the smiley face and told me to go ahead and take the picture.

Then he re-bandaged. Smaller and pink! Practical AND stylish. He gave me a choice of pink or green... both were the bright colors of the 80s. Perhaps I should've chosen BOTH and made my foot look like a watermelon? Anyway, this bandage stays on until next Thursday, when I got back to have at least some of the stitches removed. Still can't get it wet, which means at least another 10 days of shower aerobics and bagging and taping. And the oh-so-stylish shoe, which you can see in the picture above, is a new fixture in my life... at least for the next month or so.

And now Frankenfoot and I are back on the sofa. The sofa nest will be dismantled after today. Life resumes to mostly normal tomorrow. Back to work on Thursday. It was fun while it lasted...