Okay so I know I have fallen off the face of the Earth
again, and for that I apologize. I
actually have no excuse because I have been home for the last several weeks
nursing my ankle, although I have had my attention turned to some other
projects I had been meaning to get done.
So the update is that everything went okay with the surgery.
I figure I might as well tell you rather than leave you hanging and work your
blood pressure while I recite this entire saga that goes along with that very
brief sentence. I figure I owe you a
couple of stories, anyway, so I’ll talk a little about it. Also keep in mind most of the drama involved
here centers around time; what I mean will soon become apparent.
After I broke my ankle I immediately went to the hospital
and saw a doctor that told me that I would have to have surgery to correctly
fix the bone. This I believe I mentioned
in the last post and its where I left off.
Well, after a credible referral, we, Natova and I, found a doctor that
seemed to know his stuff. They spoke
very good English, which is always comforting, and the Clinic itself
specialized in sports injuries, so my ankle was not uncommon at all for
them. From what I have been told by the
first doctor I saw the day I broke my ankle and this new doctor is that I will
need to get a plate and screws put into my ankle to stabilize it while my ankle
heals itself to ensure complete alignment and no risk of arthritis. The call it fixation. As I said before, the surgeon, seemed very
credible, and knowledgeable about injury and how to fix it.
Another important piece of information is that we need to
have the surgery soon because after a couple of weeks the bone begins to heal
but not in the position we want it to. The way we want is where it provides optimum support, like the way it
was before it was broken. So we agree
that the surgery will happen sometime next week. The surgery will be at Al Salama hospital so
he will have to see what the operating room schedule looks like and fit me in
there. Mind you it has already been a
few days since the break so the sooner we get this taken care of the
better. In the meantime, all that has to
happen is that we give the front desk the paperwork we got from the hospital
and they can process it for approval to the insurance company (and yes that’s
the way it works, they have to wait for the approval to come before they do anything,
which is usually between one and three days).
We gave them everything we had but we were missing one report that we needed
from the hospital. So we figure we
would get it, give it to the clinic and be done. Yeah…
Over the next couple of days we went back and forth with
this hospital costing us precious time trying to get this stupid report that
manages not to be in their system.
Finally we get it and then give it to the admin people at the
clinic. They take it, say okay and we
schedule our the surgery for Tuesday of next week, which would be somewhere
around 10 days after I broke my ankle, which is in the danger zone of the bone
beginning to heal itself again in the wrong way. So as far as I know everything is in process
for approval which as I mentioned before should be in a day or two, so I was
pretty happy to see the clinics number on my caller ID two days later because I
knew they would tell me it was approved.
Instead what I got was “Sir we need the report so we can submit your
paper work to the insurance company for approval.” I told him that we gave them the report and
he said its not this report, I don’t know the names so I will say Report A and
B, but another report, Report B. I asked
him why they didn’t tell me this before, like say when they asked for it the
first time, or say when they took what we gave them and said “okay.” They said they will call the hospital and try
to get it themselves. Very
frustrating.
So for the next few days I am sitting in limbo wonder if
this surgery will really happen. I called
to check in from time to time but nothing’s changed. Finally the day of the surgery (yes the day
of) the doctor tells me we have approval and he will meet us at the hospital at
12 noon for the procedure.
We get there and wait around forever. At this point my leg was killing me, not
because the break hurt, but apparently it’s the swelling that gets you,
particularly right around the ankle. It
feels like your leg is on fire and is literally about to explode out of its
skin. I sometimes thought of those
Grands biscuits I used to eat back home, when you press on the side of the
cylinder along the lines where its precut and the whole thing kinds of pops
open so you can get the dough for the biscuits out. It felt like that and I was afraid the skin
on my leg would pop. Some ibuprofen I
had did help but I was instructed not to eat or drink anything before I had the
surgery, so I couldn’t take anything for the pain that morning.
After about 3 hours of hunger and agony, my surgeon finally
shows up only to tell us the surgery won’t be happening today and that we will
do it tomorrow. He apologizes profusely
but our time window was missed because he had another patient that ran
long. Also it turns out that I have to
do a whole pre-op screening that he didn’t mention; really it seemed he had been trying to
get around it. So I had to go upstairs in
the hospital and get an EKG, blood test, meet with the anesthesiologist. I do all this and I get red flagged again for
my enlarged muscular heart condition that mentioned before in another
post. Then that becomes a big deal
again, and I have meet with the cardiologist to get approval for the
surgery. The anesthesiologist refers me
to him and both seem on the fence about letting me get the surgery. They are afraid that if I go under and my
blood pressure drops to low it may be difficult stabilizing me because of my
condition. The cardiologist reluctantly
approves and sends me back to the anesthesiologist who seemed thoroughly surprised
that I got an okay from the Cardiologist and had to call to check. So anyway we get it all done, and are ready
for tomorrow.
Tomorrow comes, same hunger because I can't eat, but at least I was given the
okay to take pain meds. We make it to
the hospital again, wait for a bit and I get taken to my own room. They hook me up to an IV poke me a few times
for whatever reason and still I am waiting on the doctor. Finally he arrives and he regrets to inform
me that we won’t be able to do the operation because the hospital did not
approve it with the pre-op. I know what
you are thinking. Probably the same
thing I was thinking at the time which was yesterday they told me it was
okay. Well apparently today it must have
been some different guy and he said no.
Their main concern was that they didn’t have ICU equipment in hospital
should something happen while I’m under.
So the doctor says that we will just keep me in a caste and
let the bone heal on its own. I asked if
that meant I would have arthritis and he said it is possible. Two days ago he said it was almost certain if
I didn’t get this surgery so I start to feel he just wants to keep me as a
patient for the insurance money. My
options were to just stay in the caste or find a surgeon with a facility that
has the necessary equipment to do the surgery.
Pretty much square one. Then there is this whole thing about my heart where the doctors at Al Salama have me concerned about having the surgery at all.
I decide to look for someone, and somewhere, else to do the
surgery. The next day I went to a state
of the art hospital Sheikh Khalifa, pretty much known to be the best hospital
facilities in the city, and you can see it the moment you step through the
doors. It was like being back in the
states again. I went to the emergency
room, as instructed by my last doctor, and explained my situation. First they didn’t seem to think this counted
as an emergency, though I begged to differ since it has been two full weeks
since my break and my bones are well into healing itself. The guy I spoke to said that I could be seen
by someone but I would have to go to one of their clinics and I would have to
do it at the beginning of next week because, as luck would have it today was
Thursday, the end of the week and they don’t up until Sunday. So I’m not feeling good about this right now.
Finally we get another referral to Seha One Day Surgery
Center. It too has state of the art
facilities and is an all around nice place.
I met with the Orthopedic doctor there, nice guy, seemed
knowledgeable. He was confident he could
do it, we met with the anesthesiologist.
I explained my heart condition, he took a look at one of the many echos
I had done on my heart in the last two weeks, and deduced everything should be
fine and he saw no need to worry. They
only needed certain paperwork from the Al Salama hospital and the last clinic
we went to… Yeah, I know. But I am
excited that I found someone that could do the surgery for real this time.
So we set of on a quest to get the necessary paperwork and
it seemed to be going well. We dropped
by the clinic picked it up then went to Al Salama got the bloodwork
reports. We got it and then had to go to
the insurance department to cancel the approval of the surgery so we can get it
approved somewhere else. We then have to
go to Al Noor hospital to get a doctor’s report from the doctor that found my
condition over the winter break. He was
busy so I had to sit around for a few hours until I got to see him and have him
write a hand written report about his opinion of my condition. But in the end we got everything and came
back with our stuff to submit for approval of the insurance.
If you think that what happened the first time I did this
can’t happen again you would only be half right. You see all the paperwork was there, but the
approval did get rejected because the apparently the first one was not
cancelled. How is that, you may
ask. Didn’t I get that taken care of at
Al Salama a couple of days ago (it’s been more two days). The answer is yes and after day of
investigating apparently the culprit wasn’t Al Salama, but my first
clinic. They had not cancelled on their
side, or cancelled the surgeon, as you must cancel the surgeon and the
facility. So they haunt me again holding
me up from my operation. Then they
finally cancel and we resubmit (another day or so). Guess what?
That’s right, rejected! At this
point I can almost see the humor in it if it wasn’t me that needed this
operation. But it turns out that Al
Salama didn’t completely cancel the first time.
They still had approval for the room, because I had “stayed in it for 6
hours or more” so I was charged the cost of a day. Interestingly enough though I was only in the
hospital for about 3 and a half hours total.
Wonder how that could have happened? Anyway, we got them to cancel the room
stay too. Another day goes by, and then, finally, approval is
granted and I have my surgery the next day, almost 3 weeks after I broke my
ankle.
Everything went well, though I will admit I had some
concerns. When they took me out of the
room and rolled me through the hallways, I was nervous but stayed as calm as I
could. I had no choice but to trust my
surgeon and that everyone involved knew what they were doing. When the got me into the operating room
everything looked on the up and up.
State of the art everything, so that was good to see. I ended up getting an epidural, which does
not feel good going in and you have to keep still while you get it. The lower half of my body immediately became
warm and heavy, soon I couldn’t move my legs at all, which may be one of the scariest,
most uncomfortable experiences I have ever had.
Call me a control freak but I enjoy being able to move all my limbs when I
want to and I couldn’t do that here so, it was a little scary. As for the surgery itself, I am awake the
whole time, but all I kept thinking is that I wish they would have put me
out. I don’t see any of what is going on
because of a cloth partition, but I do here things and not always
positive. The Arabic community overall
could stand for a lesson in how to talk politely to people, but I hear a lot of
irritated doctors chastising nurses that apparently didn’t either know how to
do something or assisted him incorrectly.
And this leads to the better questions of why is this person working on
my leg if they don’t know what’s going on?
Though she wasn’t actually operating just assisting, I get that, it still
didn’t make me feel good at the time.
Even before the doctor arrived while I was getting my epidural, nurses
were standing around complaining that a doctor says he wants one thing for the
operation and then he gets here and wants another. What am I to do? If ever there was a time that I wanted them
to speak Arabic it was now. I also hear
urgency every once in a while about something, I see perplexed faces from the people
I could during the operation. All I
could do was softly sing Neil Diamond songs to myself to just take my mind of
it. I think it got loud enough for other
people to hear but I didn’t care.
In the end the doctor said that it was a bit more difficult
to do than it would have normally been because of the amount of time that
passed since I first broke my ankle, but the procedure went well and everything
is okay. I stayed for a few hours longer
until the epidural wore of and I could me my legs again. Unfortunately along with mobility of my lower
limbs came the pain the drugs kept away.
After a I got home and into the next day, it did feel like someone had shoved some screws into my ankle bone,
which is exactly what happened.
The one good thing that became of this is that I manage to
get a significant amount of time off from school, to which I return back to
tomorrow. My accident happened right
before spring break, during a time when we weren’t teaching class anyway. I
have been away from school for 6 weeks, including the break. I haven’t taught a real lesson or held a real
class in 8 weeks which ultimately is the equivalent of a Summer Break. I have literally
forgotten how to teach. I have only 5
weeks to teach before the trimester winds down again and then its exams, then summer.
Well there you have it.
You are officially caught up regarding my leg. I’ll post more soon, no really I
promise. Till next time.
