Surgery was done on all of his extremities. He went in for surgery at 1:10 pm and they didn’t bring him out until 8:45. When they did bring him out, he had had a bad reaction to coming off the meds from surgery and he was shaking violently. His eyes looked terrible. To be honest. he looked as bad, in a different way, than he did when he came in. The doctor said that he hasn’t seen bones that bad in a very long time. He said it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle to put all the bones back together. They were shattered in hundreds of different pieces. They completed everything on his legs. This included the left femur and tibia (right above and below the left knew.); pins in the left foot that i didn’t know was damaged; the cut tendon above the right knee; and reconstructing the right ankle and foot. They will have to go back in in about 3 months to take the pins out of the left foot. The doctor said that he wouldn’t be able to put weight on them for at least four months, doctor also said that loosing the foot is still not outside the realm of possibility. Time will tell. I thanked him but he said not to thank him yet. He looks better this morning and besides having the tube in his mouth and being unable to talk, he seems better, weak, but better. He is very thirsty, not having anything to drink in 13 days. They keep telling him he will get something but we can tell he is getting impatient.
I got a lot of paperwork organized yesterday while he was in surgery. That made me feel better. There is so much to do. I just try to concentrate on what I need to concentrate on at the time.
Every day is different. One day it’s his eye, another, it’s the legs, another it’s the lungs, etc. It’s a good thing that we don’t have to handle it all at once.
What I rememeber now about this day is how long the surgery was and how the reaction that he had afterward was so terrifying that all I wanted to do was leave. It was too hard to watch. Keep in mind that his was 13 days after the accident, and the first time that they did any orthopedic surgery. This is also the first time that what he said was really relevant to the situation. Otherwise he said he was a daffodil or that he needed X or Y, using the letters in the place of whatever it was that he really did need, so we had no idea what he was talking about. He spoke of "suck bubbles" and he also had some pretty severe paranoia. He wanted to get up and walk out of the hospital, and although I explained that he couldn't do that as he had no working legs, he was sure that was the only way for him to remain safe. At one point, he also said something like "It doesn't look very good for me. I hope you are going to be okay." That was pretty hard to hear from him. Still, as I write it, it is emotional for me. In any case, it was at this point, basically two weeks after the accident that he started talking in a normal kind of conversational way. Interestingly enough, this is a period of time that he still has no memory of. His first memories were after he left ICU, which was a few weeks later than this.
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