I broke my knee this past Friday night. The doctor tells me I'll be put into a walking cast on Friday. His nurses shook their heads and said it'll be a few weeks. Then 6 weeks of being in a walking cast. I can't shower. I stink. I've never had anything like this. I turn to the collective genius of EA Forums to help me get through this.

Have you broken anything? If so, you must say what and how. What did you learn that I can expect? Any tricks to staying clean? How do I keep weight down now that I can't really exercise anything? Is it possible to haul ass on crutches? How long should I expect to be dependent on pain killers? How long after that before they cut me off? I'm a side and stomach sleeper: Will I ever get a good night's sleep again? Most importantly, how in the hell do I sit on the toilet?

Ouch.

you broke your knee on your birthday?


you MUST tell the story or no advaice for you, gimpy.




[imposes moratorium on advice until Gulliver discusses his travels.]

i, too, await some background on your break.

i will offer that i broke my ankle three years ago, reguiring 12 screws and a steel plate to hold by tibia and fibula in their proper places.

oxycontin and vicodin are your friends FOR ONLY A COUPLE DAYS and then they will fuck you up.

you will master the laying-on-your-back bath. having a loved one who can scrub you makes you feel pathetic, but slightly cleaner.

watch it with the crutches the first time you get on an escalator.

be thankful it's not july (hot) with the cast. i had flies. enough said.

you will become amazingly good at hopping around on one leg. this will confuse you when you are able to walk normally again.

good luck.

Having broken bones numerous times, the best advice I can give is to start shooting heroin.

Kerble: the story of Lemuel's birthday.

I have broken both arms and both thumbs. Seperate incidents. La bicicleta es responsable.

[cancels fatwa]

I've broken my wrists 3 times, but all before the age of 18. At 30 I bet it's a whole different experience. My major one was when I broke my right radius and ulna both clean in half. I was in a cast for about 3 months total. I think I got it changed about 4 times (including the initial splint). By then end I had to chop it off, like 2 or 3 weeks before I was supposed to. It was just too itchy (You will make real good friends with an unraveled wire coathanger. Trust me.). When I took it off my arm looked so nasty. Like all withered and pale, and all the hair was really dark.

Sorry, no advice really. It's gonna suck dude.

Broken pinky toes: 3 breaks total (one was broken with a chicken)
Broken radius and ulna, right arm.
Broken metatarsals, right foot.
Broken fibula, left leg.

I also had double arthroscopy on my knees.

My most recent break was annoying because the emergency room splinted it wrong in the first place, with a freakishly large and heavy plaster cast. After a few days of dragging this monstrosity around, I got a better, lighter splint.

Not being able to shower for a few days was tolerable, but I think that's because i cannot smell anything. I am sure my mother would disagree that it was tolerable.

After arthroscopy, I took one Hydrocodone, and lost about two days of my life. Never taking it again.

Basically, you should have people around you to keep you sane. Lots of DVD's or at the very least a good cable service. You will learn to love infomercials, and if you are like me, you will yell at the participants after you have seen them about 20 times. I still get excited at the Magic Bullet ad, when they make the quesadillas.

I wish there had been a better story. I've used "helicopter accident," and "saving children from a burning orphanage." I cannot wait to drop "the first rule of fight club is that we do not talk about fight club" on someone.

To top it off, I had to send my puppy back to the breeder for safe keeping while I remain on the mend. Else, she'd be consigned to the crate, or she'd eat the house.

The true story, linked above which I will add to momentarily, is too lame to be related. It's a non-story. Nothing any boy over the age of 10 hadn't done with his body in regards to a fence. The drop was just more like 5 feet than 3 feet.

School starts for me tomorrow, so I will try to hobble to classes then. Hopefully, they'll give me a wheelchair placard and I can park right in front of my buildings. Still, it takes a bunch of energy just to pee, let alone read Averroes in the prone position.

The only other points of the story worth relating were the more or less stoned, annecdotal ones at the hospital. In the ER, they set me up with an IV, and must've added something to it. I'd been drinking, add pain, shake with poppy-derived narcotic, and I was delirious. Most of my memories are like snapshots, but there's no chronological order to them at all. If you could imagine writing a few sentences down on some playing cards, shuffling them, and then trying to sort them out, that's what it's like. I've never felt anything like that before.

Perhaps the best one was getting my first look at the knee when they took my pants off. Most knees have that lemon-shaped raised oval where the patella is, right? Well, mine had no such thing. Instead, if you were to slice the lemon in half, from 3 to 9 O'clock, and move each half down about 4 inches that's what it looked like. The front of my knee actually looked more like a hinge, like the back of a knee when I looked at it.

As for unchonological anecdotes: the orderly that wheeled my gurney and me from my room (I don't ever remember being in a room.) to pre-op kinda got lost. All I could see was up and to the sides right? But I could tell we were going in circles and going back around. At one point he stopped to ask how to get into the OR, and someone said, "gotta go back around the other way." I immediately thought of the scene in Spinal Tap where they're marching around the basement before the Cleveland show. Apparently, I complained to the anesthesiologist about this. I even said "hello Cleveland" when I met him. I don't remember his name. I do remember thinking that if I were a gay patient, I'd want him to be my doctor.

I also remember the cough they made me do after they took out my breathing tube. I think they made me do this, not because it was good for my lungs but because it's a polite way of saying "we stuck a hose up your willy" without actually saying that to someone. I thought an alien had crawled up me and was going to pop out of my bladder during said cough. It was nice not having to get up to pee though for 2 days.

I was also so high on drugs that it took me 4 tries to time the PCA machine to see how often it'd let me get some morphine. It turned out to be 10 minute intervals.

My first nurse, John, was basically the dude from the Red Stripe commercials. He was annoying. He'd keep talking to me, without ever answering any of my questions. Basically, I wanted to know, what was done to my knee. He just kept saying, "No, no! You are doing grate!" I protested as my point was, if I was doing anything like great, I wouldn't be in the fucking hospital. He didn't get this point. My patience was short.

That's about it folks. Sorry. There's not more. If it matters, I was drinking Wild Turkey and Dos Equis not at my usual watering hole.

The real bitch of it is that I was sort of resigned to giving myself the gift of going to Chicago for the Saturday of the TG 25. I'd cut off body parts to see TNY, and the rest of the bill are no slouches. I suspect now, I will be paying doctor bills. Crap. WF: 0.

Damn ... I fractured my ankle in three places slipping on some ice (while doing my laundry, no less) about four years ago, so I can sympathise.

If your doctor is like mine, they'll give you plenty of painkillers, but don't go to town on 'em. They'll only do so much for so long anyway. Save them to give to friends who visit.

Sponge baths are the only way to go for a while at first, but you can shower by covering the cast with a trash bag, sealed at your leg a couple inches above the cast, first with a layer of masking tape and then a layer of duct tape. It's a major pain in the ass, but after sponge bathing that first shower will feel sooo gooooood.

Many well meaning friends will send you baked goods. Enjoy them sparingly, beause until you get moving around you will spend a lot of time on your ass. However, once you start hobbling around on crutches, you'll discover it's a lot harder and more sweat-producing than you expect, so you'll start getting some exercise you aren't planning on. Physical rehab will also help get you back in shape, assuming the doc puts you on that. Follow what they tell you, it's annoying but it does make a difference.

You will have to lean on your friends for a lot of help (shopping, laundry, crap like that); if you're like me, you'll find it a little humiliating, but swallow your pride and do it. It makes things a lot easier and you don't help yourself much trying to do it yourself.

Don't drive the electric cart at the market too fast. It's fun, but those bastards will tip over on you.

And if you're stuck on the couch for a while like I was, Turner Classic Movies is your best friend in the world.

Hope this helps, and best of luck to you.