The End of the Beginning

Laura's tibial plateau fracture is officially repaired! She was in surgery for just under four hours on Wednesday night. The ex-fix was removed from the outside of her leg, the broken chunks of tibia were re-aligned and fastened together with a stainless steel internal plate that should stay inside her leg forever.

There were a few complicating factors. Her meniscus had been driven down into the shattered top of the tibia, so they had to dig that out first. Then they needed a fair amount of bone graft to add to the top of the tibia for parts of the bone that just weren't there anymore. And there are a lot of stitches holding the repaired meniscus together. But, all in all, it was a very successful surgery.

View from the front. The darker spot on the top left side of the tibia is where the bone graft was used.

Lateral view. The white line to the left (front) of the internal plate is a partial view of where the bone broke. It broke in a V-shape when the femur slammed down on top of it.

I think today (Thursday) is a day just for rest and pain management. This is a very painful surgery. She takes narcotics orally every 4 hours, and can get an IV narcotic push every 2 hours, but that means that she spends about an hour in relatively lucid, relatively happy (although still very painful) time, about a half hour on the edge, and about 30 minutes every 2 hours in what appears to me to be excruciating agony. But, even by tomorrow the pain is supposed to be much more manageable. She'll probably start some in-hospital PT tomorrow (Friday) and I'm guessing she'll be released on Saturday.

Then it's time for the journey home. If that truly ends up being Saturday she'll have spent exactly three weeks in the hospital.

The surgery was done through the fasciotomy wounds (reopened at the top) although the surgeon did have to extend them further up toward the knee. So, she'll only have two significant scars on her leg. That being said, they'll be pretty gnarly, very long scars! Not that she needed proof, but now there's physical evidence that my wife is a total bad-ass!

Thanks as always for the kind comments, thoughts and prayers! There'll be a long PT road on the way to recovery, but we're nearly ready to go home. The first stage is nearly over. We can't wait to get home!