ChezLark

I went for my 6-week follow-up visit at Harborview today, and learned many interesting things. For one, I got all my medical imagery on CD-ROM. Some of it is quite disturbing. Consider this X-Ray of my femur on the day of the accident:

This is the most dramatic image of the fracture; the other pre-operation X-Rays show the bone better aligned. The fact that the bone splintered somewhat makes this fracture “slightly comminuted“. Apparently this is not a very significant amount of splintering, though — the break is fairly clean.

They took a new course of X-Rays this morning that show the intramedullary nail and the fracture starting to heal:

The doctor I talked to today said that it’s quite invasive to go in after the bone fragments, so they prefer to just let them be. The cloudiness around the fracture site is a callousy material starting to form, which is the first healing stage. It will take around a year for the bone to fully regenerate around the fracture.

However, I don’t have to wait that long to get use of my leg back. I started bearing partial weight on my broken leg today, increasing to 100% over the next month. By 4-6 weeks from now, I should be walking unassisted!

Even better, the doctor said that by the 6-month mark, I should have regained full power and motion in the broken leg, and can participate in sports. That means that if I heal on schedule I don’t have to miss the snowboarding season! Between 6 and 12 months the bone keeps reinforcing itself and becomes increasingly strong.

This all made me quite happy, despite the disturbing splinteriness of my fracture.