Just when it seemed like things had finally settled down and life was almost beginning to return to some semblance of "normal," curve balls must be thrown. This one started out seeming like a non-issue. A suit/boot combo I had worn seemed to have irritated the skin over my tibia plate, but hadn't rubbed it raw or anything along that line, so it seemed pretty benign. Irritation and inflammation occurred, but didn't seem to worrisome.
At my PT appointment that week, she commented on the inflammation and tenderness - it seemed a bit unusual. This raised a little red flag for me. By that Friday afternoon, the area where the fracture blister had been was getting "stretched" with a very fluidy feel underneath the thin layer of skin over it. I placed a moist bandaid over it to see what would happen. Saturday afternoon it came through, and began draining quite a bit of fluid, some of it milky. This concerned me for fears of an infection taking place or getting started, so first thing Monday morning I made an appointment with my ortho for the first available appointment which was Wednesday. In the meantime, I began treating the wound fairly aggressively using the calcium alginate dressing to help draw out the inflammation.
Doc wasn't any more thrilled than I was - while he had expected this, since it had seemed to heal over he had hoped that we had dodged a bullet. Apparently not so much. He wanted to get in there and clean and flush it out, and see where it was getting infected - if it was getting under the plate at all, then he would have to pull the hardware out. This wouldn't be ideal as it is a little too early in the healing to normally pull hardware, but the bones are set, it would just delay my weight bearing status yet again - but still better than losing a leg!
He scheduled the surgery for first thing the next morning - I had to be in the surgery center at 5:15 a.m. for a 6 a.m. procedure. I was unsure what I'd wake to, but I was just resigned to what we had to do - I didn't want to muck around with infections. As it turns out, whether it was pure luck or a combination of an early catch and treatment, either way, he was able to leave the hardware in. I woke to a big old bandage on my leg, but was left with weight bearing status and direction to leave the dressing in place until my follow-up the following Wednesday.
The first couple days I was pretty miserable, currently sitting here on the second full day post op. At this point I'm feeling better than I did yesterday, and hoping that overall this will be a quick-ish recovery since it was mostly just a fluid flush and clean with some incisions related to that. I have no idea the damage on the skin, but at least I can weight bear. At this point,still hoping/planning on making the races next weekend since the skin will have had over a week to heal by that point and should hopefully be past the worst of anything. Cancelling the races is still a possibility, but I'm hoping not to since he was able to leave the hardware in place.
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