Surgery on the Horizon

Let me say that I'll be glad when this blog no longer mentions surgeries, whether mine or Ken's or the neighbor's dog's cousin's.  That said, I thought I'd let you in on what I've recently found out.  You know, I like knowing that you know, and I like that lots of you pray.  ;)

Last week I had an appointment with the surgeon who'll be hacking into my leg in October.  Well, it didn't start out as an appointment with my surgeon.  It started out as a second opinion (that would make the 5th opinion, but who's counting?) with a specialist who happens to be highly recommended and an English speaker and a Christian and experienced in traumas and really, really nice.  He impressed us from the get-go with his understanding of what happened and was still happening, based on looking at the x-rays alone.  After a brief examination, you'd have thought that he was a mind-reader or something!

This doctor felt good about combining the next two projected surgeries into just one.  So in October, he will take out the plate on the left (outer side) of my leg, remove the seven screws that go through my bone, rebreak the femur by removing a wedge of bone from one side (and possibly putting in a piece of bone on the other side that he'd take from my hip), then reset that break and secure it with a new plate on the inner side of the bone, this time with a whole lot more screws.  For those of you who aren't getting my explication and like to google, the part where they take out the wedge of bone is called an osteotomy (distal femoral osteotomy, or DFO).

This is a much bigger surgery than we were originally expecting, with a much bigger price tag and a much more involved recovery.  The plate alone will be around $2,000, and insurance doesn't cover it.  I'm trying not to let that stress me.  My thought is that it's worth the trouble to get it over with all at once and combine the recovery into one slightly ugly, slightly long, time period.  I may not feel like that in the middle of it all, but feel free to remind me that I really did say that I prefer to get it over with.  I H-A-T-E feeling like life is on hold while the leg takes center stage, I hate feeling like our ministry is on a certain level of pause, I hate sitting in this chair all the time... you get it.  And if biting the bullet means I can shorten the time in getting back to normal, I'm all for it.

In the meantime, please help us pray for the pain that's pretty constant, for the surgeon who is working out the details of how this'll go down, for the finances to cover this, for my sanity as I try not to remember how "uncomfortable" this was the first time.  I know finding this doctor was an answer to prayer, and I know God hasn't forgotten us.  Thanks for the prayers you've already been sending up.  :)

Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest