1 Year + (March 24 & 25)

Well, had an interesting 28 hours.  I took my meds at 11:30 pm Friday (23rd) and slept through the night without waking up once!  Was really pleased.  Pain seemed much less all day on Saturday (24th).  My little bro came by in the morning and ended up having my leg down for about 30 minutes or so.  Pain wasn't bad but I did take some oxy after he left.  Overall though, barely any pain all day (compared to before).

Now the crazy part.  Yesterday, I noticed that my leg was really beginning to smell.  I've worn the CAM boot before during the summer and it does tend to stink a bit after a few weeks but nothing too bad.  Well, last night it really smelled.  Then today, it was even worse.  I'm talking 10 times worse than really bad foot odor.  Someone mentioned that I should check my leg as the smell could be indicative of an infection.  I'm not supposed to remove the cam boot and especially not the ace wrap and gauze.  I did take off the boot and noticed some dried blood and a bit of a fluid outline on the ace wrap.  And the smell.....was even worse.  I wrote on the Healthboards forum asking for advice and a nurse said I should call my doctors office as they will have an after hours service.  I called, gave my info, and was told a doc will call me within 30 minutes.  The on-call doc was one of the partners but he sounded either drunk or like he had just woken up.  It was only 9:30 or so.  Anyway, he told me to either take off the dressings and visually inspect the wounds or go directly to the ER.  If I inspect them myself, I need to be able to rewrap them.  Well, I don't have the supplies or anything.  I decided to wait a bit and asked the nurse on the forum and she said she recommends not screwing around and going to the ER.  A few other people also recommended the same.  I decided to take off the ace wrap and there was quite a bit of dried blood on the gauze and some yellow staining.  Once again, it smelled horrible.  I tried to look and see the wounds but the gauze was stuck and I was very nervous.  I decided that I better just go get it checked out.

Got to the hospital at 12:30, was triaged and in a room at 12:35, saw the doc at 12:38, and was out of there by 1:20.  I love this town!  Anyway, when the nurse first came in, she said "wow, that smells like a really bad infection".  Crap, not what I wanted to hear.  Doc then unwrapped everything and my wounds looked great!  Not even any staining on the skin!  Such a relief.  They said the smell is from all the fluids that had been collected in the gauze and ace wrap.  I asked if I did the right thing by coming in and they said absolutely.  If it had been an infection, it could get really nasty really fast, especially because of the screw removal.

For anyone that has the same worries, here is what the nurse told (which I searched all over the internet but couldn't find).  The primary indicator of infection is red or aggravated area around the wound.  The next is any drainage.  Third is fever and last is odor.  Everything I found online gave each symptom the same weight.  Oh well.

So, here are pics of my foot.  Pretty sweet.  Only 8 days out from surgery!  Can't believe how big the incision is over my achilles.  The pic of the lateral side isn't that much different than the one from last year when they did the osteotomy.  I do have to like that there isn't all the crusted nasty blood on them like last year.