... of casts and crutches

My previous post talked about the three incidents that happened to me on Saturday... now I’ll elaborate on the ankle event, and explain why I am now sporting a half-cast and wielding crutches... there’s only so much I can or want to share 140 characters at a time!

Upon getting back to my parents’ place, I took my shoes off, limped my way up the stairs, studied what looked like an apple under the skin of my ankle, took a nice long shower, and once I was refreshed and dressed, went to hunt for ice, bandages and a cushion. Spent most of the afternoon lying down with the bandaged appendage slightly elevated with the occasional hobbling foray to the next room for some internet time.

On one of those forays, though, the ankle decided it REALLY didn’t like any weight on it! There was pain.. nothing I couldn’t handle, but I didn’t like its presence... so decided to get it checked out.

Fyi, it wasn’t just a Saturday evening - which already had me wondering where to go since I figured most clinics would be closed by this time – but it was also the 1st of May, or Labour Day, hence a public holiday, again upping the chances of not finding anything open. ... so we went to a nearby hospital emergency room instead.

They put me in a wheelchair so I wouldn’t have to hobble around to the different places they needed to take me: the nurse’s checking station, the x-ray room, the doctor’s office, the pharmacy, the cashier.... and in between every stop I was pushed back into the waiting area and parked facing the TV – I found that rather telling :p

Anyways, so the ER doc wasn’t sure what she was seeing on the xray: might be a chip, she said, but wasn’t sure,,, and the radiologist wasn’t around to interpret the film... so I’m supposed to go back on Monday and see the ortho guy...

... in the meantime the swelling was pretty bad, and the doc speculated about damaged ligaments, then fixed me with a backslab(?) half-cast thingy and told me to keep the foot elevated as much as possible, and sent me off with muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatories. They would have sold me a pair of crutches too but we already have a pair from a while back, when my dad had a motorcycle run over his foot.

So what was the damage to my wallet? Read Healthcare in Malaysia: my ankle woes to find out and weigh in on your own hospital experiences!

... So all this happened on Saturday... and Sunday was my school reunion, which I attended with crutches... more on THAT in another post!