Chapter Four: Operate, Recover, Repeat

Dr. Stanley was quite thorough on my first visit. He took a series of X-rays that kept me on the table for at least an hour. I think I scared a few other patients, though, when he tried to move my leg past a certain point and I let out the most horrific scream I'd ever heard. He explained in great detail what would need to be done. The first step would be to put me under general anaesthesia to test my actual range of motion and inject some kind of steroid into my hip. I'm still not sure what the reason behind the steroid was. The second step, if his thoughts were correct, would be a procedure known as a Kramer Osteotomy. Simply put, a wedge would be cut out of the top of my femur. The bone would then be rotated back in to place and held together with three surgical screws. Dr. Stanley was quite optimistic about it, but I wasn't sure what to think.

We opted to go ahead with the surgery. Meanwhile, things continued to sour between my father and The Bitch. She was sleeping on the couch next to her kids and was given two weeks to find another place to live. Almost a month had passed before my father decided he'd had enough. He left a simple note telling her to be out of the house before he got home from work or he'd have a deputy there to remove her. I had just happened to be sick and staying home from school that day. I'm quite glad I did, as The Bitch tried to take all kinds of things that didn't belong to her. She even tried to take the cookware my grandmother had given me for Christmas! Fortunately, my sister was up early between the time my father left and when everyone else woke up to start their day. We still had a pumpkin on the front porch that had been there since shortly before Halloween. Amanda snuck outside with a knife, cut open the pumpkin, and smeared the rotting innards all over The Bitch's car. After learning about this later in the day, I made sure to give her a high-five when she got home from school! The Bitch claimed that she and her little shits were living out of her car in the small park across the street, although we knew she was taking advantage of a single male neighbor's free space in exchange for...well, you get the idea. After a few days, she just disappeared and left most of her belongings with us. It took a while, but most of the clothes ended up at Goodwill and anything else that couldn't be used or donated went on the burn pile.

February 27, 1996
It was exactly two years after my grandfather had passed away. My grandmother, who normally worries for all of us, was wound up like a Swiss watch spring. My father and I arrived at Santa Rosa Childrens' Hospital at 5 AM. I was nervous as hell, as the only other "surgery" I'd had done was on my toes, and I was fully awake for that one. In the pre-operative ward, they attempted to start an IV and failed miserably. I've always been tough to stick, and I know exactly where I get it from. My other grandmother (on my father's side) once went through twelve attempts to run an IV before surgery. I remember getting the "happy juice", as they called it, and wondering why I still didn't feel all that great. I said goodbye to my father and they wheeled me off to the operating room.

The next thing I remember is waking up an hour later in recovery with my leg strapped into a machine. This machine would flex my leg up to a certain angle slowly and then lower it back to a flat position. It was horrendously uncomfortable, and when my body was finally able to feel pain, I realized that my hip hurt like hell when it got to the top! The doctor kept me in the hospital for three days to make sure I acclimated to the machine. After my release, I had a very busy schedule of physical therapy ahead of me. The doctor's hypothesis was confirmed, and my next surgery was scheduled four weeks after the first. My physical therapy went well. Fortunately, most of it was in a swimming pool, and it actually felt good to get in the warm water. I was able to move more freely than I had in the last six months, and I was very happy about that!

March 26, 1996
It was time for the second operation. I had a strange sense of deja vu as we entered the hospital again at 5 AM. Sure enough, it took two tries to run the IV again, and the happy juice wasn't. The doctor was in a better mood, which gave me a little reassurance that this would go well and perhaps I would be back to normal after a few months. This time, when I woke up (five hours later) I was not strapped in to the machine. I was somewhat relieved. It was only a few minutes later that I discovered the joys of the morphine button. By the time Leno started, I was high as a kite and watching Univision. Now, I don't speak a word of Spanish beyond the menu at Taco Cabana, but it was apparently the funniest thing in the world to me!

By the next morning, they had cut back my morphine and wanted me to try standing up with a walker. No weight bearing on my hip for at least two weeks. By my second day up and about, I was making it down the hall to the nurses' station and back with almost no trouble. The walker was easier than I expected. Five days after surgery, the doctor cleared me to go home and told me to start using the infernal contraption again, starting off at a very low setting. It was decided that, since my father's work schedule would leave me home alone most of the day, I would stay with my mother for the first two weeks. This had several down sides, although being able to get help whenever I needed it managed to counter all of them. I slept in the recliner for the first two nights because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get out of the bed. As things improved, I started walking around more with my crutches and was able to negotiate the stairs outside with almost no difficulty. The machine still hurt like hell, but that was to be expected. It was also at this time that I started getting serious about tinkering with computers. My mother had a 386 machine that had never worked properly, and with my downtime, a friend of hers let me borrow "The Computer Bible", which at the time was about six inches thick. One day my mother decided to go grocery shopping. I asked her to put the computer up on the dining room table so I could see exactly what I was reading about. A few minutes after she left, I hobbled my way into the kitchen and grabbed a screwdriver from the drawer. By the time she returned, the computer was stripped down to nothing with each piece labeled and sorted on the table. To say she was furious would have been an understatement. I told her that since it had never worked in the first place that there was no harm in trying to see what was wrong. Sure enough, when I put it back together, it powered on and loaded Windows 3.1! From that moment on, I was hooked.

I made it to my first follow-up with the doctor, and he was pleased with the results at that point. I began physical therapy three times a week and the doctor cleared me to go back to school. With Boerne High being so spread out though, the doctor thought it wise for me to finish the school year in a wheelchair. On my first day back, I had a miserable time trying to get through doors and make it to my classes. Most people ignored the fact that I was even there. When I made it to my locker, however, someone was kind enough to help me get my books together and get my belongings situated on the back of the chair. This guy had the locker next to mine. He was a sophomore at the time, a year above me, and had transferred to Boerne shortly after I originally broke my hip. We'd said hi a few times in passing, but this was the first time we really talked. Sean quickly became one of my best friends (and still is to this day) and I will never forget how he took the time to help someone he barely knew just because it was the decent thing to do.

With the end of school came, for the most part, the end of the wheelchair. I still kept it for going places like the mall and anything else that would have otherwise required a lot of walking. My physical therapy increased for the summer. I was now going in four days a week. With my father's schedule, we realized it would be easier if I went in with him at 3AM and hung out in the break room at the airport. For the first few days, I just sat in there and read for hours on end. I started with some computer books, then moved on to other topics that interested me.

By this time, my father had recovered from his relationship with The Bitch. He even started dating someone else, a co-worker from the airport. Cindy was tall, attractive, and very kind to all of us. She had five children, two boys that were a year off of my age in either direction, a girl a year younger than my sister, and two very young ones who were perfect angels compared to the two we'd dealt with just a few months before. The two boys and I hit it off rather well, and they would come in on my therapy days to keep me company. It was only two days before we decided that we couldn't find any decent trouble to get in at the airport, so we begged for bus passes so we could start spending our days at the mall. The walking turned out to be great therapy for my hip, and it was great to have a couple of friends that I could connect with. Unfortunately, my father's relationship with Cindy didn't go very far. She wanted more children, which my father wasn't too keen on (aside from the fact that it wouldn't have been possible anyway).

Physical therapy kept me busy for most of the summer, but no matter what I did, my range of motion didn't seem to improve like the doctor had hoped. Nothing showed up on the X-rays at my follow-up visits until December. By that time, I was walking and bowling again, although with a limp just as bad as before my hip had been broken.

At my December follow-up, the doctor conferred with other orthopaedic surgeons in his office, then came in the room to give me the bad news. Apparently, the surgery had been done too late after the injury for it to heal as he'd expected. It was a possibility he'd mentioned before, although the odds were not all that much to be concerned about at the time. He gave us a list of other hip specialists to see, and I realized that this would not be over any time soon, and it was time to make some new plans. My next appointment was for a second opinion from an excellent surgeon with a far better bedside manner than the last. He took his own series of X-rays and sadly came to the same conclusion.