The Leg

I walk again! In my whole life I have never known what it’s like to be unable to walk! Since breaking my fibula at the end of January this has been a total frustration. After 4 weeks in a plaster cast I was sent to an orthopaedic surgeon because the fracture wasn’t knitting, in fact it was further apart and now slightly displaced. He operated and inserted a screw from underneath the “knuckle” bone (I think that’s the malleolus) into the upper part to hold the fracture together and correctly aligned. This was done in the dismal Rustenburg hospital called Ferncrest which could really use a makeover! Us orthopaedic day patients were put in a windowless ward in the maternity section which was so freezing cold that I worried more about catching cold than about the op! Actually I don’t even remember being taken into theatre! Whatever they gave as a pre-op knocked me out and I had to ask OAP a couple of days later what happened!!! I don’t remember coming round or going home and yet I am informed that when he came to fetch me I was sitting up eating supper and quite chatty! Apparently we had to wait hours for the only wheelchair the hospital owns to take me out to the car. It was painful but not in plaster, just bandaged and with a splint to stop it moving and strict instructions NOT to put any weight on it. A week later I went back to the orthopod who removed the splint and dressings and put the leg in a fiberglass cast with by ankle now bent at 90 degrees. All concerned, including me, was amazed at how black and swollen the foot still was so I left with instructions to keep the leg up higher than my heart to get rid of the swelling and to get a “boot” fitted to the cast which would allow me to begin walking. Apparently walking will encourage bone growth – but after every walk I have to lie down and raise the leg for a couple of hours!! Anyway for one reason or another it was another 4 days before we could get to the “boot” place where I was fitted with a neoprene shoe that velcros around my foot. An ingenious device that enables me to walk with ease!!!! I still have to be careful only to put a bit of weight on the ankle but what a relief to have my “other” leg back!! I can stand while unbuttoning and unzipping my shorts to get to the loo, I can stand while I wash up – which is about the only housework I can do with ease, I can even, with some trepidation, get up and downstairs which means I can revert to our upstairs bedroom (when OAP has got rid of his ghastly head cold – poor man!) so that our guests from Belgium will be able to have the guest room! Meanwhile, I, for the first time in my life, have a MAID!!!! I am totally in love with Paulina who arrives on a Saturday morning and whizzes through the housework and leaves a few hours later with R100. I know, minimum wage hasn’t hit here yet and I was told not to rock the boat by everyone else who employs her! OAP still puts the washing in the machines in the laundry and hangs it on the lines he’s strung in there but Paulina, like a good fairy, goes in and takes it down, folds and irons and leaves it for him to collect in the wash basket. I think I shall employ her forever!


The day I had the boot fitted I walked from one end of the shopping mall to the other ( in Woolworths I realized that I couldn’t carry any of the stuff I’d bought so had to put most of it back and fit the rest into a little backpack I was wearing!) and then met OAP for lunch in the food court. I was shattered and sweating like a horse after running the Derby. I know I overdid it that day but it was such a break through that I was elated.

Each day I walk up and down the driveway to get stronger and in a weeks time will be able to put a little more weight on that leg until I can just walk normally on it. Unfortunately (for the leg) we are off to Cape Town with the Belgians on the 2nd March and this cast is supposed to come off on the 11th so I will have to have XRays and find an orthopod in Cape Town who will take it off and fit me with a sports brace which I then have to wear for the next 6 weeks.

So, a very expensive lesson has been learned: Birding is Dangerous!