Stitches out

Yesterday all the stitches were removed - not exactly a painless process - but a real milestone. Now I use band-aids to protect my toes instead of heavy bandages which means i can now wear regular shoes instead of The surgical shoes i've been in for the last couple of weeks. I can also shower now and within a couple of day i'll be able to really get my feet wet - I.E. swimming, surfing, hot tubbing -- many things that I've been prevented from doing for that last couple of years because of the open wounds on my feet.

When I was in the hospital, just after I woke up, I had a number of weird dreams about swimming and river-rafting. Not white-water rafting, just floating down the river. They were so vivid that one of the first times I remember using my iPad (with my badly atrophied fingers) was to try to look up river rafting companies on the American River. I've never understood what was behind those memories and images but they were incredibly powerful and remain so today. Now that I can actually get in the water,  I'm pretty excited.

The final surgery

Last Friday marked an unexpected milestone on the road to recovery. It was a long awaited surgery to remove a toe from each of my feet. Both these toes were badly damaged by gangrene and after the black caps fell off they left open wounds and exposed bone on the end of each toe. After many weeks of waiting the wounds wouldn’t heal and continued to bleed regularly. Closing these wounds would also allow me to  stop taking the heavy doses of antibiotics that I’ve been on since leaving the hospital over a year ago.

The surgery went as planned – in fact it really went better than planned because after the surgery the pain was much less than expected. The unexpected part was the results of testing the amputated toes – we had expected to find infected tissue all though out the amputated tissue. Instead we found infection only in the exposed bone, not in the rest of the toes as a number of MRIs had previously identified. This is fantastic news as it pretty much confirms that all the infection in my is now gone and no additional surgeries are planned.

We had expected to find the infection throughout the toes and were going to “watch and wait” as I reduced and ultimately stopped the antibiotics. Now with the confirmation that the infection is really gone (and this is pretty strong confirmation) I can get back to healing without fear of more surgery and amputations.