How to Properly Break Your Ankle: Day 55

Today was all about the visit to the doctor. It's been about two months since the incident when I broke my ankle, let's recap on how it all went down -with some added bonus information.

How to Properly Break Your Ankle: The Amy Anderson Way

Step 1: Go bouldering with friends.

Step 2: When it's your turn, first be sure to fake your fight with gravity. Then have a real competition, see who wins. Also, be sure only one part of you misses the crash pad and listen for the snap when you land.

     To deviate for just a moment, I did not just break one part of my fibula, I        broke two parts of it.

          The first, larger break, was fixed easily once the screws were inserted.

          But the second, smaller break (as circled in both x-ray photos) is the                 special one. When you break your fibula, there are two different ways               to break it. The 'normal' way and the 'other' (or Amy Anderson) way.
               The normal way leaves your fibula broken at an angle -there's a                        doctor term for an angled fracture but I am no doctor, I think it                        starts with an 'o.'
               The Amy Anderson way is when you break your fibula with a                            perpendicular fracture (again, not a doctor term.) The boring part                      about a perpendicular fracture is that it takes your bone longer to                      heal because there is less surface area for it to heal to.

And I thought that was a dust fleck...

Step 3: Once the paramedics arrive, make life easier on yourself and have them remove the shoe on your foot for you.

Step 4: Once in the hospital, just kind of hang out and wait for your doctor to set your ankle so it doesn't look like this anymore:

Step 5: Stay in the hospital an extra day because you're running a fever and try not to go stir crazy.

I'm surprised there were no repercussions for writing on the walls.

Step 6: Fill your time at home with mostly useless activities until you're more mobile.

So bored!

Step 6.5: If you hang out with friends, don't let them pity you. Do your best to convince them you're completely capable ... then fall right in front of them.

Step 7: Go to your doctor for a check up around two months after the incident and learn that because you just had to be different, you get to be on crutches and in a boot longer.

But it's cool because then you can be buff in one leg and not the other

Booyah!

How to Properly Break Your Ankle: Day One

I'm Amy. One day, I thought it would be great to go on an adventure with some friends. Our adventure of the day was bouldering! It looks kind of like this:

This is my friend, she's really good at it.

When it was my turn to go, I wasn't that pro. I was much more along the lines of:

Me. Struggling.

Then, I missed my hand hold and I fell. I hung out on the crash pad with my friend. Our hang out looked a lot like this:

I'm the one on the ground, t-shirt over my head, holding my leg.
(Please note, the red dots are supposed to signify blood)

Then the paramedics arrived to take me away in an ambulance and the theme of the day turned out to be "Who can get Amy's age wrong the most?" It started with a paramedic who continued to say that I was 23. And every time he said that I corrected him, loudly, with a "21!" It took him three times. Then an uneventful ambulance ride to the ER where they got my age wrong again. This time, I was born in 84 and I was old enough to be 25. Finally in the ER, I got to see my ankle, and it looked like this:

My real life ankle. Not on straight. Photo thanks to mom.

Then a lot of tiredness followed, I had a fear of falling asleep because I thought they would think I lost consciousness. They took some x-rays and eventually wheeled me off for surgery. And that just about ends day 1 for me.

Day 2: Cyborg Amy.