Monday, January 12, 2015

Oh My %$!!@##*%^ Knee

Okay, so that stupid fall I described in my last post? Yeeeaaah. I finally got it checked out after realizing Friday that the swelling was still pretty significant and the kneecap itself felt distorted. I went into the ER Saturday morning (which, BTW, is the BEST time to go into an ER in HRM since there is no one there). I waited all of 30 minutes to be triaged (it was between me and the older man who had the flu) and seen by a med student (during a regular time I could wait up to 3 hours for this same sequence of events). She lightly touched the top of my knee and I almost cried it hurt so bad. Yikes, I knew that couldn't be good. She said there was still a lot of swelling but it wasn't significant enough to be drained (-wait-what? Oh hells no you were not going to stick a needle in my knee-OMG!) Then she said I might have broken my knee cap. I'm not sure if I said Oh Damn or Oh Shit. Off to xray I went. Another 30 minutes passed and the Doctor (with the med student in tow) came in and asked if they had taken the xray of the correct leg. I said they had but had to do the xrays a few times over. So I waited another 30 minutes for a radiologist to come into work and have a look at the xrays. They couldn't find anything conclusive. So I sat in the cast room having a huge bandage put on my leg and I'm still asking, so did I sprain it then? Or is it cracked...or what? The Doctor had long gone onto another patient (by 10am the place was filling up) so it was me, the med student and the casting guy. The med student said if they hadn't taken an xray they would say it was broken. She gave me an appointment slip to see an orthopedic surgeon in a week and a prescription for crutches and a leg brace. She said hopefully by the time I see the surgeon the break will start to heal and should show up on an xray at that time. Until then I'm to keep my leg immobilized, keep taking pain meds and wait. I looked for the "butterfly" brace she had prescribed but it seems those need to be ordered into a drug store (yes even in a city like Halifax, they don't supply these things in-store). My poor/very accommodating husband and I spent hours driving around the city looking at braces but had no luck finding anything that worked. I figure I'll wait until Friday and see what the surgeon says before I start ordering knee braces. My hope is that I cracked it and I will only need to tape this thing up after Friday. I can tell you, having your leg immobilized gets old after about three hobbling steps. So this also means my daily running streak is out the window. Boo. My January Pushup challenge though is still going strong. At least I can do upper body work to try and keep the grumpiness at bay. Let's see what Friday holds...

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