The Second Worst Day of my Life

When I was checked out of the hospital, I was told that I had a follow-up appointment with the surgeon in a little over 2 weeks.  This doesn’t sound like much as I’m writing it, but at the time it felt like an eternity.  Anyone who has ever had something like this happen to them – where you don’t know what to expect, you don't know what will happen and you are in a serious amount of pain – to hear that you won’t see the doctor for 15 days, feels like forever.

My foot was wrapped in a soft cast which was not supposed to get wet, and I was told not to put any weight on it.  I was taking oxycodone along with Tylenol and Ibuprofen, but I found that when the oxycodone would start to wear off after 8 hours, my pain would start to ramp up again and it became very difficult to handle. 

About 5 days after I left the hospital my dad called me on the phone and told me that I needed to get off of oxycodone.  He had a member in his band who had struggled with drug addiction and being on hard pain killers after an injury started that problem in his life. 

I was faced with the prospect of a very difficult month or a lifetime struggle with addiction. 

I told my dad that I wasn’t sure if I could do it because when the oxycodone would start to wear off that the pain would start to ramp up and that the longer I let it go the worse it would get.  The nurses had told me that pain was easier to control when you managed it better with pain killers ahead of time and that when it got out of control that it was harder to bring back in. 

I talked to my doctor about this, and he said that a good strategy with Tylenol and Ibuprofen was to stagger them every 3 hours or so to make it so that I had coverage all day instead of taking everything all at once every 8 hours.  That made sense and I decided to try that. 

And I decided to heed my dad’s advice and start to try to taper off of oxycodone.  I was able to do it in about a week and had made the decision that I would endure the pain for the short time to avoid a long-term addiction. 

But though rotating between Tylenol and Ibuprofen did help I was still in a fair amount of pain.  I was essentially uncomfortable all day.  Because that was the case I decided to see if I could work from home because at least working would take my mind off the fact that I was in pain all day.  I attempted to watch movies and “relax” but found that most of the movies that I normally liked involved action scenes or violence (for example Lord of the Rings) and seeing/hearing even the slightest bit of action made me feel worse.  I realized after a couple attempts that I really couldn’t enjoy watching movies. 

I also couldn’t read books or think deeply for the sake of personal enjoyment.  The only thing that I found that worked to pass the time was to play Solitaire on my computer while listening to sports talk radio or sermons.  

I found that I was able to work because my sense of doing something productive helped to take my mind off the pain and discomfort that I was in.  I did struggle focusing when I was on conference calls with a group because often times someone would start talking and I would feel a fresh dose of pain that would then cause me to lose track of what was being talked about.  When I was on a call by myself, and I had to do all of the talking and listening I was able to retain focus better. 

~

Until my appointment in August I was told not to move my foot or ankle at all.  If I were to describe the pain that I was in I would say that it felt that there were pieces of metal jagged into various places in my foot.  Sometimes it felt as if there was a metal spring in my foot that when the pain would escalate it felt like the spring was being twisted tight.  That pain was so present that when they took the wrapping off on August 11^th, I asked my wife to look at it to see if there were metal pieces that had been put in to keep everything together or something.  She told me that there weren’t.  There was no metal at all.  I realized after – once I started moving my ankle – that the pain was a mixture of the swelling pressing into callouses and a lack of movement.  In fact, my pain significantly decreased once I started moving my ankle. 

Sleep was another story all together.  I struggled to sleep more than 4 hours a night.  What would happen is that I would start to fall asleep, the pain and discomfort would hit me, and I would wake up and struggle to get back to sleep again for hours.  I would pray and God would answer and sometimes give me 5 or 5.5 hours straight of sleep – which was a great breakthrough at the time – but every night was a great battle. 

Many nights when I couldn’t sleep I would put on worship music and just worship God.  Like I said in the previous post the Presence of God was both so easy to touch and a mysterious relief from the pain and discomfort.  I’ll never forget those nights as long as I live. 

Another part of the challenge to sleep was that I was sweating uncontrollably at night.  I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would be covered with sweat.  Not only would all my clothes be completely soaked with sweat, but my entire bed was wet from the sweat.  I was able to navigate this by having 2 beds in my room.  When I would wake up in the middle of the night from this, I would switch to a dry bed. 

That pretty much was the case until I had my follow up appointment with the surgeon. 

~

This brings me to the appointment itself.  The accident occurred on 7/23 and the follow up appointment was on 8/11.  The accident was the most traumatic day of my life but the follow up appointment was certainly the second most traumatic. 

Like I said above I was in a lot of pain.  I went to the doctor that day knowing that they were going to unwrap the dressing, but as I got closer and as it started to dawn on me that this was actually going to happen, I started to get very nervous, almost to the point of having an anxiety attack.  I really struggled to calm down and I found that the only thing I could do to calm myself was to play worship music and worship God.  I played a song that became the theme of my recovery – “Wherever You Lead” by Bethel Music and God came and visited me there and I felt His peace.   

But nonetheless it was still incredibly difficult for them to unwrap it because my foot was so sensitive that to even have someone touch somewhere close to it was nearly unbearable.  They started to unwrap it and when they finally unwrapped it, I took a look at my foot and it was the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life.  I would describe it by saying that it looked like the bastard stepchild of a football and a human foot.  It was swollen to a much larger size than my other foot and was green, purple and black.  My wife says that it looked like the foot of a dead body. 

Upon taking it off the surgeon asked if I had been putting weight on my heel.  I told him that I was told not to do to that and that it took a lot of will power to not move my ankle (which it did – especially when the pain would really kick in).  He told me that I was supposed to be putting weight on my heel.  The nurses confirmed that I had indeed been told that and I could tell that he was frustrated at this miscommunication. 

He told me to move my ankle and I couldn’t move it.  I can’t express the stress I felt knowing that the stakes were so high, being asked to do something and not being able to do it.  He then got real serious me with and talked to me about amputation.  Saying that he could end all my discomfort by amputating my big toe.  But then right after – as if as thought miraculously entered his mind – he told me that I would have another surgery in 6 days.  He said in the meantime I needed to start moving my ankle and trying to put some weight on the heel of my foot. 

The surgeon’s nurses gave my foot a temporary wrapping because the stiches were still bleeding both from the cut in my big toe from the accident and in my pointer toe from the amputation.  I was told to take that off in 2 days.

~

Like I said earlier that day was the second most traumatic day of my life.  The surgeon had gone from being optimistic about my big toe to having serious conversations with me about amputation.  I was in so much pain that I nearly had a breakdown when they took the wrapping off and my foot itself looked hideous.

Many people knew about my appointment that day and many were talking with and texting me about it.  The appointment itself was like a spiritual punch in the stomach, the prior optimism from the doctor was gone and all I had left was God.  In my first texts with a friend, I said the below:

After I had some time to pray and seek God, I saw this as another wonderful opportunity to stare down an obstacle in faith and declare that God was going to bring me through it.  Like I said earlier I saw this trial as a unique offering that I could give to the Lord where - unlike any time in my life up until that point - I could take a David-like stance against a giant, dig my heels in and believe that over and above anything that I saw in the natural world that there was a God in Heaven who would fix something that I deeply cared about.

When you read the Gospels, you find that perhaps nothing more brought pleasure to Jesus than when people believed that He could fix their impossible/improbable situations.  In fact, the only time in Scripture where it says that Jesus was brought to a place of wonder was when He saw the Roman Centurion’s faith (Matthew 8:10).  Think about that for a second.  Its not an easy thing to make God wonder.  He took a blueprint and established a plan from which He used to form both the most intricate details of cellular and atomic structures along with the immense and vast reaches of the universe.  He can’t learn anything new because He has all knowledge.  He has never been afraid because He is entirely sufficient in and of Himself.  God is not fragile and needy like us.  And yet God – when He looked at this Centurion’s faith – was brought to a place of wonder.

I have always been moved by this and had wanted to give God an offering like this with my life and now I found myself with a symbolic sacrifice that I could lay on the altar.  So, I texted the below to my friends declaring that there was a God who was greater than this situation and greater than a bad report.

My primary care physician sent nurses to visit me twice a week at my house during my entire recovery process.  I can’t explain how much this helped me psychologically.  After I left the hospital, I had one appointment with my primary care doctor and then I had to wait until I had the follow up with the surgeon that I just talked about above.  With the pain that I was in and having never gone through anything like this before (and not knowing anyone who had gone through something like this) I would have been a nervous wreck had it not been for these nurses.  All they really did was measure my vitals and ask me how I was doing but it was more the fact that I knew that someone with medical knowledge was coming to check up on me to make sure I was ok.

She visited me for 3 months and on her last visit I shared with her that she was a “light in a very dark time” for me.  My recovery process has really warmed my heart to those in the health care industry.  Sometimes we can feel entitled to treat medical workers poorly because regardless of how we treat them they will get paid anyway, but I think we should remember that caring for the sick and hurting is a beautiful and godly thing and that those who spend their strength doing so should be given the appreciation they are due.  Everyone has a job that pays them for their labor but only a few choose to spend their time confronting the darker side of life that deals with things like pain and death.  Those who do should be honored.  Just saying.

~

It was my home care nurse who took off the temporary wrapping that my surgeon’s team had applied.  And I’m so happy she did.  Like I said earlier my foot was so sensitive that I freaked out when anyone got near it.  This was so intense that I got into an argument with my wife because I thought she was getting too close to my foot when I was sitting on the bed in our bedroom, and she was walking to the bathroom.  In hindsight I can imagine that she probably thought I was insane, but I was deathfully afraid of someone touching it and when anyone got close, I got very anxious.

After she did this, it became my responsibility to wrap my foot myself every day after cleaning it.  These 6 days – from the traumatic visit with my surgeon until my surgery the next week – were an incredibly happy period for me.  I started moving my ankle which like I said earlier significantly reduced my pain.  My sleep improved though I was still uncomfortable due to being concerned about the stitches in my foot and worried about moving in a certain way that could cause the wounds to open up, but nonetheless I was able to sleep better than earlier.  I was also able to shower.  I hadn’t showered in nearly 3 weeks. I still had the markings on me from the surgeries from a couple weeks earlier.  You may ask how I cleaned myself before this – I mostly did so by using disinfectant wipes but to be honest when I had the initial wrapping on my foot, I was more concerned about not getting the wrapping wet than I was about getting the rest of my body clean.

I can’t express how good it felt to have significantly less pain, a clean body and to be able to get some sleep.  My third surgery was coming up soon but here after the hardest month of life I found myself in a brief reprieve and I was thankful for this oasis that God had given me.

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