At the beginning of October (one month ago almost to the day) I had surgery on my right ankle to repair some messed up ligaments. While I have had multiple knee surgeries they were all arthroscopic and I wouldn’t consider them a major surgery. This ankle surgery was a knock you out, cut your foot open, and tighten that shit up kind of surgery. The surgery went great.

The same cannot be said about the recovery.

For twelve days after the surgery my foot was wrapped up from toe to knee with dressings. Built into the dressings was an liquid cooling ice pack thing. The instructions were to keep my foot up all the time, run the ice machine all the time, and to be very careful when getting around. During these twelve days I probably spent no more than thirty minutes not on the couch or in bed, no more than thirty minutes without the ice machine running. I felt like I had done a pretty good job.

Day twelve dawned beautifully. I was going to get to go to the doctor’s office, get my splint removed, sutures out, and start the next part of recovery. There was going to be a walking boot and some sort of instructions to increase the use of my ankle. Sarah had even offered me Chinese takeout as a milestone reward that evening. I was so pumped.

We get to the cast room and the nice lady cuts off my splint and all the bandages, saving the magical water cooler thing, and then goes to get the doctor. When he arrived he looks at it and say, “I don’t like that.”

He explained that it was more swollen than they would have liked and the wound wasn’t healing very well. Cool. He poked and prodded, hemmed and hawed, and removed every other staple. He recommended that I go to a hospital, specifically one that is about thirty minutes away from my house, to get some hyperbaric oxygen(HBO from here on out) treatment to help with the healing. This was the silver lining I decided to focus on. I love hyperbaric chambers and actually studied how to operate them when I was at commercial diving school.

Hyperbaric chambers are magical devices that puts you under pressure breathing pure oxygen and it helps with healing and inflammation. The chambers I trained on at school were multi-place chambers that allowed for multiple people to be in the chamber at once and you breath through a mask to get your pure oxygen. The chamber I would be in at the hospital is a magical acrylic tube that you go into by yourself that they pump full of oxygen as they pressurize the tube.

While you are in the tube you can only wear the provided scrubs and can bring nothing in with you. You are provided with juice, water, a urinal, and a washcloth. Pretty bleak until they hand you the movie list. They had about 250 DVDs to choose from and since you are in there for two hours for each treatment you have a lot of time to watch movies.

Before I could start I had to go through their intake procedure which was like all intakes at medical places. Asking you all the questions and explaining what was going to happen. Once all that was done the doctor who runs the show stopped by to take a look at my ankle.

He came in and looked at my ankle. He stared at it for a couple minutes and said, “That is concerning.” He went on to say that it looked like it was infected… so yay? I was admitted into the hospital, given two IVs at the same time and put in a room. I was lucky that I didn’t have to be hooked up to an IV the whole time and between that and my knee scooter I was able to get around my room pretty easily.

If you have never been in a hospital for a stay (this was my first time) you are not missing out. Everything about it is annoying, they bother you all the time to steal your blood, which they can’t take out of your IV so they have to stab you each time. They are constantly checking on you and then have to nerve to ask how you slept. NOT WELL!!

I was incredibly fortunate to have a wonderful care team of nurses and CNAs who joked with me and we had as good of a time as you can while hanging out in a hospital. After my first day I was finally allowed to go do the HBO and encountered another group of really nice nurses.

Here is a quick list of the movies I watched during my treatments:

  • The Matrix 1,2, and 3
  • 21 and 22 jump street
  • Air Force One
  • The Princess Diaries 1 & 2
  • The Rock
  • others that I don’t remember at the moment.

It wasn’t until that second night that I discovered the true silver lining: The Hallmark Channels Countdown to Christmas!! I love Hallmark movies and a hosptial is the perfect place to watch them. Since you are constantly being interrupted you miss what is happening in the movie, but if it is a Hallmark movie it doesn’t matter because you can figure it out pretty quickly. This worked out pretty well for Sarah and I whilst we hung out in the hospital.

Much like my love of romance novels my love of Hallmark knows no bounds. There is something magical about watching romance movies that are very low stakes. Hallmark also does a good job of attempting different genres and though they retread some tropes they are so much fun I don’t care. It is also great to see the actors who are obviously having a decent career doing holiday movies.

On the third day of hospital stay they sent me home. We had to do IV antibiotics at home and I still had to be driven to the hospital for HBO. While I think this was a long ordeal for me, it had to be even more of an ordeal for Sarah. She was a champion and drove me everywhere when no one else was able to. She was my responsible adult and I couldn’t have done it without her. A big shout out to friends and family that helped us during this time.

As with all my blog posts I started with an idea of what I wanted to write, what the conclusion would be, but… here we are.

Stay healthy, watch Hallmark movies, and stay safe.