Although the doctor said we were done on the 11th this month, I still had a small hole to tend to in my gash area. Last night it finally closed up to the point that I took the bandage off to shower and it came off with no visible signs of blood or ooze. It was the first time I left the house with my leg unwrapped since probably last September. It feels so freeing not to have that wrapping on. Every time I have gone to the bathroom I have dreaded taking off the bandages to the point I kept a kitchen trash bag nearby so I could cover and tape my leg for a quick shower when and if I pooped.
I am glad the whole process from start to finish was virtually painless, other than when the injury happened, that felt like someone hit me with a baseball bat, but ever since, even with a 1-inch deep gash and maybe 4-5 inches long, it never "hurt". The nurses told me I must have damaged the nerves in the area to the point that there are none there to tell me it should hurt. The gash was surrounded by a bruise two or three times larger than the cut, so it is probably true. The doctors told me the purple in the area would get better, but it may also stay that way. It is a leg, not really up at eye level, so it doesn't bother me if it stays a little ugly.
What I do want to see come back to normal is the thickness of my leg around the area. It has been wrapped in bandages since around April. I used to get wrapped in the Unna Boot for the first few months and that went from above the toes to right below the knee. Once they decided to do the skin graft, the plastic surgeon was only worried about covering the wound area and he wanted me showering and washing it once a day. It was gross, in that I did go about five months without washing my right leg. At one point, Wife said "No! Your foot is way too gross", I didn't want to get anything wet, but she took a wet rag and scraped my toes and all the skin she could reach to clean them up. But back to the point, since I was only wrapping around the 6-7 inches around where the injury is, I developed a weird look, where my calf looks twice as big as the bottom of my leg. Wife said it looked like a chicken drumstick, all bony at the bottom. I am hoping that a couple of days with my leg free will allow it to come back to normal.
Have I learned anything from this? Yes, if I had jumped on it sooner, I might have avoided it opening up and becoming all the work it became, according to Wife. It did start out as two skinny lines on the surface. My mother in law said God works in mysterious ways, so maybe I had to suffer through all this, to find out that I had low testosterone and a bad thyroid, which I might not have discovered if I hadn't been forced to go to the doctor, so there is that. I also learned that Boy is a decent driver, after the surgery I had to give him control over driving me around as I couldn't move my ankle enough to drive myself. It was good to see he is a fair to decent driver. Oh, and I learned that I will not be running a lawn mower ever again. I have two boys in the house, and when they leave, hopefully in another fifteen-twenty years I will be hiring a professional service. Boy is best suited to cutting the grass as he is always wearing pants and boots, like the lawn mower instructions suggest. I was playing it wild by doing it in shorts and Crocs for way too long.
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