(Drumrolll please) Dr. Chambers! Yes, the man is an Orthopedic Podiatrist Doctor. No, the man is a carpenter. He’s responsible for reassembling my foot. I’ll try to paint a picture of his repair.
First, he made a seven inch incision in the side of my foot. The bone is a ‘butterfly break,’ meaning it is shattered pretty good. It's the fifth metatarsel bone. That is, the 'This little piggy went eey deedle dee all the way home' bone. He lines up the pieces of the inside of the bone, then drills in a wire (actually, a tiny drill bit) from the top of the bone, through all the pieces. He disconnects the drill and taps the wire in the rest of the way. He describes it as a ‘shish kabob.’ Great visual.
Next he places a thin plate in the middle of the bone. Then he screws the shish kabob side, through the plate, and pulls the pieces from the outside into place. Finally he screws in a few from the outside. Eleven screws, total. Beautiful. All within the confines of a seven inch incision. Looking at all the busy work he did inside, I am struck with two thoughts; 1.) I would have cut all the skin off the top and side for access. 2.) No wonder when I stood, my foot felt like it would explode, even with my good friend of five days, Percocet. I even wrote a poem to Percocet, which was really terrible. Hey, I was under the influence, what would you expect?
Doctor Chambers asked me a few troubling questions:
“Did you walk on that foot?”
“Uh, yeah. A little bit.” That’s man code for I got up and finished the race, walked on it all day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning until the first x-ray.
“Well that explains why some of the bone is missing.”
This is where I would have been better off without the Little Woman in the room with us, if you know what I mean. Asking silly questions like, “Maybe that’s why we should have gone in right away.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t a question. But I’ve done the Saturday emergency room thing. Wait three hours. They take x-rays. Tell you it’s broken. Then they tell you to go see the doctor on Monday. See, I’m saving valuable health care costs. That’s man code for I’m an idiot. At least I should have got some crutches and kept off of it.
Anyway if Humpty Dumpty had Dr. Chambers back then, that poem would have turned out way differently. Something like this:
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Dr. Chambers screwed him back together with some really cool, ridiculously overpriced tools.
A better ending, but a lousy poem.
It does make one wonder. If I were to break a bone, why would I want horses and men to fix it? Wouldn’t I just call Doctor Chambers?
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